Tolu Alabi played for Nigeria before she moved to America on a scholarship. She built card products at Stripe. Now she is running Cleva, giving a continent a way to get paid in USD and keep it.
The first real money Tolu Alabi ever earned came from a basketball court. She played for Nigeria's U16 national team in 2008 and suited up for First Bank's club side, and the paychecks that came with it did something more lasting than pay the bills. They taught a teenager in Abuja that a skill, applied with discipline, could be converted into income - and that income could open doors. Years later, that idea would become a company.
Today Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva, a banking platform built for a simple, stubborn problem: talented people in emerging markets earn dollars and then watch those dollars shrink the moment they touch a local bank. Cleva gives freelancers and businesses in Africa a real USD account - somewhere to receive international payments, hold value, convert currency at a fair rate, and spend with a card. It joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and it is growing fast.
Before Cleva, Alabi spent more than a decade learning the machinery of finance and software from the inside. She started as an FX algorithmic quant at Goldman Sachs - the kind of role where currencies are not an abstraction but a live problem measured in milliseconds. She wrote code at WhatsApp. She moved into product, first at Amazon as a senior technical product manager working across logistics and augmented reality, then at Stripe, where she was a lead product manager building Issuing and Banking products and the identity and access team.
Put those pieces together and the founder makes sense. FX at Goldman gave her the currency instinct. Stripe gave her the plumbing of modern banking. Amazon gave her the discipline of shipping products for millions of people who will never meet you. Cleva sits exactly where those three skills overlap.
That framing matters. It is easy to file Cleva under “African fintech” and move on. Alabi resists the label because the pain she is describing - getting paid across borders without losing a chunk to friction and bad rates - belongs to remote workers everywhere. The remittance and cross-border payment market for African talent alone runs into the tens of billions of dollars. She is starting where the need is sharpest and the founders know the ground best.
Alabi's road ran through the American Midwest. She earned a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Grinnell College, where she was more than a strong student. She played women's basketball, earning a spot on the All-Midwest Conference Second Team after a standout 2012-13 season, and she worked as a computer science teaching assistant and math lab tutor. She also co-authored a research paper on a FAST K-Selection algorithm for the GPU, published in the ACM Journal of Experimental Algorithmics.
It is a telling combination. The point guard and the researcher are not two different people - they are the same person who likes hard problems, reads the whole floor, and does the unglamorous reps. After Grinnell came an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and after Stanford came the tech roles that would eventually give her the confidence to build a bank from scratch.
Alabi built Cleva with Philip Abel, the company's CTO and an MIT alum. Between a Stanford MBA and an MIT engineer, both born in Nigeria and seasoned at companies like Stripe and AWS, the founding team has an unusual blend: they understand the emerging-market user in their bones and they have shipped serious financial infrastructure at scale. That pairing is part of what convinced investors.
The pre-seed round, announced in January 2024, was led by 1984 Ventures with participation from The Raba Partnership, Byld Ventures, FirstCheck Africa, and Y Combinator. The product itself is deliberately unflashy: open a USD account, receive international payments, convert currency at a competitive rate with fees capped rather than open-ended, and spend or save. The design choice - building for Lagos rather than New York - shapes everything from onboarding, which uses Nigeria's Bank Verification Number and government ID, to the fee structure.
Cleva is not the only thing Alabi runs. She founded Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that uses the game to teach fundamentals and life skills - discipline, resilience, teamwork - to young people across the continent. She is a self-described LeBron James enthusiast, and she has a favorite question she likes to pose: why hasn't Africa produced a LeBron or a Steph Curry yet? Her answer is not about talent. It is about training resources and the chance to compete. She wants to build academies that close that gap.
You can see the throughline. Next in Line and Cleva are, at heart, the same project in two forms: give people the tools and the opportunity, and get out of the way. One does it with a court and a coach. The other does it with an account and a card.
Alabi talks about Cleva as banking for non-US residents, starting in Africa and expanding outward. The near-term roadmap has included USD cards, savings in US assets, and invoicing tools for freelancers - the everyday features a professional needs to run a business across borders. The longer-term ambition is bigger and quieter: to be the default place a talented person in an emerging market keeps their money, so that geography stops being a tax on their work.
It is a founder's story that rewards a second look. The discipline is from the court. The currency instinct is from Goldman. The product craft is from Stripe and Amazon. The mission is from watching what happens when hard-working people in her home country get paid and then lose part of it to the plumbing. Cleva is her attempt to fix the plumbing - and, if it works, to do for a continent's freelancers what basketball once did for a teenager in Abuja.