nigeria
(18)
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
BuyPower
BuyPower is a Nigerian bill-payment platform that lets people buy prepaid and postpaid electricity tokens - plus airtime, data and TV subscriptions - online and through its mobile app, 24/7. Founded in 2016 in Abuja after its founders grew tired of queueing at utility offices, it integrates directly with Nigeria's electricity distribution companies (DisCos) and has grown into a cash-flow-positive business reporting roughly $20.6M in revenue by the end of 2024. It was the first company from Northern Nigeria backed by Y Combinator (W17).
Cleva
Cleva is a USD banking platform that lets freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa - starting with Nigeria - open U.S. dollar accounts in their own name, receive international payments via ACH, wire, or stablecoins (USDC/USDT), and spend through a virtual dollar card. Founded in 2023 by Stripe and AWS alumni Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel, and backed by Y Combinator (W24), Cleva helps users get paid in dollars and hedge against local currency volatility.
Curacel
Curacel is an AI-powered insurance infrastructure company building the rails for insurance in emerging markets. Its cloud APIs let insurers automate claims processing and catch fraud, waste and abuse, while its Grow product lets banks, fintechs and e-commerce platforms embed insurance into their own apps. A Y Combinator Winter 2022 company founded in Nigeria, Curacel works with insurers such as AXA Mansard, Old Mutual and Jubilee across roughly ten African markets.
Dojah
Dojah is a Lagos-based identity verification and anti-fraud infrastructure company that helps digital businesses onboard users, verify identities, and stay compliant through a single API and no-code tools. It aggregates KYC, KYB, AML, biometric, document and address checks across Africa and beyond, letting fintechs, banks, and marketplaces confirm who they are dealing with in seconds. A Y Combinator W22 company, Dojah serves customers including OPay, FCMB, Cowrywise and Fincra.
Eazipay
Eazipay is a Lagos-based payroll and payment automation platform that lets African businesses run payroll, remit taxes and statutory contributions, and pay their teams in about five minutes. Founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator (W22), it also offers payroll APIs for banks and neobanks and financial-wellness tools such as early wage access for workers.
FoodCourt
FoodCourt (legally CoKitchen) is a Lagos-based cloud-kitchen company that owns and operates a portfolio of virtual restaurant brands, cooks the food itself, and delivers through its own app. By ditching the aggregator model that simply connects restaurants to eaters, FoodCourt controls the menu, the kitchen, and the logistics end-to-end, letting it sell quality meals at scale across Lagos and Abuja. Backed by Y Combinator (S22), it reached profitability in 2024 and has delivered millions of meals.
Karsa
Karsa is a stablecoin neobank that gives people in emerging markets a global dollar account. Users can deposit local currency, save in dollar-denominated stablecoins, receive international payments, cash out to local banks, and spend abroad with a card - without needing a traditional US bank or any crypto knowledge. The product hides the complexity of self-custody wallets and a peer-to-peer stablecoin network behind a familiar banking interface, targeting the roughly one billion people who live under high inflation and capital controls.
Miden
Miden is a Nigerian fintech building payments infrastructure for businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Through a single API, companies can issue virtual and physical cards in USD, NGN and multi-currency formats, run banking-as-a-service programs, open business accounts, and handle bill payments - the plumbing that lets other companies launch financial products without building banking rails from scratch. Founded in 2022 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Miden has issued over a million cards and processes billions in transaction volume.
Schoolable
Schoolable is a Lagos-based fintech (Y Combinator W'19) building financial infrastructure for African education. Through a web platform for schools and a mobile app for parents, it helps private K-12 schools collect fees on time, reconcile payments, run payroll and manage expenses, while letting families plan, save, borrow and pay school fees in installments. Founded by Henry Chibuzo and Angela Essien, it operates on the premise that access to affordable finance is the biggest barrier to quality education in Africa.
Spring in Africa
Spring in Africa is a Nigerian-rooted fintech that lets people and small businesses send, receive, and hold money across borders in both fiat and crypto. It began as Wallet.ng, grew into Wallets Africa, and in 2023 launched Spring, a multi-currency wallet that pairs an instant account number, cashback, and payment links with Ethereum and stablecoin transactions shown in plain USD. Backed by Y Combinator (W19), Michael Seibel, Microtraction, Samurai Incubate, and Mozilla, the company has processed millions of dollars a month for tens of thousands of consumer and business accounts.
Suplias
Suplias is a Lagos-based B2B fintech that helps FMCG distributors and small retailers in Africa buy inventory on credit. Founded in 2019 and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, it started as a marketplace connecting mom-and-pop shops with manufacturers, then leaned into its Obtainly app, which lets retailers and distributors pay suppliers, build a credit history, and access short-term inventory and LPO financing with no collateral and repayment over roughly 30 days.
Topship
Topship is a Lagos-based digital freight forwarder that lets African businesses and individuals ship parcels, cargo and freight to and from more than 150 countries. Founded in 2020 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, it functions as an asset-light shipping layer - booking, tracking, insurance and, increasingly, an AI shipping assistant - aimed at the merchants who move goods across borders but were previously stuck with informal agents and opaque pricing.
Vendy
Vendy is a Lagos-founded payment infrastructure company that lets businesses accept payments inside the places people already chat - WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and AI assistants. Sellers spin up a shop in minutes with a catalog, cart, automated invoicing and checkout, and buyers pay without downloading an app or signing up. Started in Y Combinator's W22 batch, Vendy now positions itself as 'agentic payments infrastructure,' offering a single API across cards, bank transfers, mobile money and USSD, and reports more than 20 million transactions processed for around 2,000 merchants.
Pastel
Pastel builds agentic AI for banking operations, aimed at the regional, mid-tier, and community banks that most fintech innovation skips over. Its flagship platform, Sigma, deploys AI agents across customer onboarding, due diligence, fraud detection, anti-money laundering, screening, and executive reporting - trained on local data and regulations rather than retrofitted Western systems. Founded by Stanford graduate students and rooted in African markets, Pastel started as a small-business bookkeeping tool called Sabi before pivoting into compliance infrastructure for financial institutions.
Beacon Power Services
Beacon Power Services (BPS) is an energy-technology company building data and grid-management software for Africa's power sector. Its AI-enabled platforms - Adora for real-time grid monitoring, CAIMS for utility asset and customer data, and the Xepp consumer app - help electricity distributors cut losses, prevent outages and digitize networks. Founded by aerospace engineer turned investment banker Bimbola Adisa, BPS now serves utilities reaching more than 50 million people across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Zambia and beyond, processing over a billion grid data points a day.
Tikue Anazodo
Tikue Anazodo is the co-founder and CEO of Kudos, the AI-powered smart wallet that automatically picks the best credit card for every purchase and layers on extra rewards. Born in Lagos and trained at Columbia, he built consumer payment products at Google and Affirm before launching Kudos in 2021 with Ahmad Ismail. What started as a browser extension is now a 'self-driving wallet' with over 200,000 users, $200M+ in annualized checkout volume, and $17.2M raised from QED, Patron, SV Angel, Max Levchin, and The Points Guy founder Brian Kelly.
Adeyemi Ajao
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.