Spring in Africa built a wallet for the money the world kept losing at the border
It started as Wallet.ng, grew into Wallets Africa, and became Spring - a single app where a Lagos trader and a visitor from abroad can hold naira, dollars, and ether, and actually read what they spent.
In 2016, a software engineer in Lagos was wiring a gift-card system into M-Pesa, Kenya's mobile-money network, when he noticed something that would not let him go: the money simply moved. No forms, no waiting, no fees hidden in the fine print. John Oke kept asking why that experience stopped at Kenya's edge - and why an African sending money across a border still had to fight for it. Spring in Africa is the eight-year answer to that question.
The company most people first met as Wallet.ng. It grew into Wallets Africa, and in October 2023 it launched Spring, a multi-currency wallet that now gives the whole operation its name. Three labels, one stubborn idea: give the continent money that is secure, legible, and borderless. The pitch is short enough to fit on a napkin, which is part of why it is hard to copy - there is nothing to hide behind.
What Spring actually does
Strip away the category words and Spring is a place to keep money and move it. A user signs up and gets an account number in one sitting. They can send and receive funds, buy mobile airtime straight from a fiat balance, spin up a payment link to collect money from a customer, and hold both traditional currency and crypto - stablecoins and ether - in the same wallet. When they touch the crypto side, Spring shows the value in plain US dollars, on screen, as it happens. No second app, no price chart, no mental arithmetic mid-payment.
That one line does more work than it looks. In markets where failed transfers and mystery charges are common, Spring made a promise most banks avoid: if a transaction fails, the reversal is instant. Trust, treated as a product feature and shipped like one. It is the kind of detail that does not make a demo look flashy but makes a customer stay.
Who it is for
Two crowds, mostly. The first is everyday people across Africa - and visitors to the continent who want to transact with an app and a card instead of a scavenger hunt for a working ATM. The second is small and medium businesses, the shop owners and freelancers who need to get paid without a merchant-services runaround. Reported figures put the company at roughly 250,000 consumer wallets and more than 20,000 business accounts.
The problem it is chewing on
African money has a legibility problem. Currencies swing, fees appear from nowhere, and sending value across a border can mean juggling several apps, a bank, and a prayer. Crypto promised to fix some of this, but for most people a wallet full of ether is a wallet full of numbers they cannot read. Spring's bet is that the winning product is not fiat or crypto - it is both, in one place, shown in a currency the user understands. Payment links extend that to commerce: a seller can accept a bank transfer or cryptocurrency from the same link, and never explain the difference to the buyer.
How it is different
Africa's wallet aisle is crowded - Chipper Cash, Kuda, PalmPay, Flutterwave's consumer arm, and crypto-fiat players like Yellow Card all want the same phone. Spring's separator is not a single killer feature; it is the insistence on legibility. Instant reversals, no hidden fees, crypto priced in dollars, and one wallet that refuses to make the user choose between fiat and blockchain. Where competitors pick a lane, Spring tries to make the lanes disappear.
Spring Wallet
Instant account number, cashback on transactions, and ether transfers displayed in USD.
Payment Links
Custom links that accept either a bank transfer or cryptocurrency, from the same page.
Airtime & More
Buy mobile airtime from a fiat balance; manage PINs, uploads, and transaction status.
The business, and the money behind it
Spring earns the way payment companies do: fees on transactions and processing, card usage, and business accounts, serving both consumers (B2C) and merchants (B2B). Third-party data pegs annual revenue in the neighborhood of $10 million, which should be read as an estimate rather than a filing.
The cap table is the tell. Y Combinator wrote its standard check for the W19 batch. Around it gathered Michael Seibel, Microtraction, Swell Partners, 9Yards Capital, Chartboost's Maria Alegre, and others - roughly $1.6M reported in total. In mid-2020 came fresh capital from Samurai Incubate and Mozilla, alongside Seibel again. When investors in the Valley and Tokyo both write checks for a Lagos wallet, it is worth noticing where the money is pointing before the headlines catch up.
The people and the expertise
The company is small and engineering-led, roughly 17 people, built around Oke's own path from writing code at SureGifts to running a fintech that Silicon Valley funds. He carries the titles Founder, Chairman and CEO, and the résumé to match the domain: Ecobank's 2018 Fintech Challenge, Y Combinator in 2019, a16z's Crypto Startup School in 2020. The through-line is someone who kept building the bank while the definition of "bank" caught up to his app.
Where it sits in the market
Spring is a neobank-shaped company operating where a lot of Western fintechs will not go, in a market often dismissed as "hard." Hard markets have thin competition and deep loyalty - that is the moat, not the bug. By stitching fiat and crypto into one legible wallet aimed at both people and small businesses, Spring is positioned less as a crypto app or a bank app and more as the everyday money layer for a continent still writing its digital-payments rules.
A short history
The naming may keep drifting - the social handles still read @walletsafrica under the Spring brand - but the promise has not. Secure, legible, borderless. Whether Spring becomes the money layer for a continent or one strong option among many, it has already answered the 2016 question for hundreds of thousands of people: yes, the money can just move.