Waza Wants to Move Money Where the Banks Won't

The problem Waza set out to solve is one most people never see, because it happens in the back office. A clothing importer in Lagos wins a deal with a supplier in Guangzhou. The order is agreed, the margin is real - and then the money has to move. That is where the trouble starts. Getting hold of dollars is slow. The wire routes through a chain of correspondent banks that each take a cut and a day. By the time the payment lands, the exchange rate has drifted and the supplier is asking why the invoice is short.

Waza, a Y Combinator company from the Winter 2023 batch, is a B2B payments and liquidity platform built for exactly that moment. It lets businesses in emerging markets - starting with Nigeria and Ghana - hold balances in dollars, euros and pounds, and pay suppliers across the world without the usual friction. The pitch is not glamorous. It is plumbing. But it is the kind of plumbing that decides whether a trade actually closes.

The originA problem the founder had already lived

Waza was founded in 2023 by Maxwell Obi and Emmanuel Igbodudu, and the idea did not arrive as a hunch. Obi had run business at Sendwave, the remittance company later acquired into the WorldRemit/Zepz group, where he spent years negotiating partnerships and regulatory relationships across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Watching money move - and fail to move - across those corridors, he kept running into the same gap: businesses in emerging markets had no clean way to hold hard currency and pay vendors abroad. Before Sendwave, Obi had co-founded Amplify, a startup acquired by the Nigerian fintech Carbon.

His co-founder brought the engineering. Emmanuel Igbodudu was a senior engineer at Revolut, where he led the Vaults team, with earlier stints at Carbon, Moniepoint and FairMoney - a tour through some of the most demanding payments infrastructure in the market. Between them, the two had already shipped financial products at scale before they wrote a line of Waza's code.

By maintaining more control over our infrastructure, we can provide cheaper and faster solutions than the competition.Maxwell Obi, Co-founder & CEO

The numbersA quiet line that kept going up

Waza's growth chart has no viral spike. It has something better for an infrastructure business: consistency. In its first month of operation in January 2023, the platform processed $280,000 in payments. By May 2024 it was moving roughly $70 million a month - about $700 million annualized - after averaging near 20% month-over-month growth for more than a year. That is the kind of curve you get when customers do not come for a launch; they come because they have to pay someone, and then they come back next month.

Monthly payment volume, Waza

$0.28M

Jan '23

~$8M

Q2 '23

~$22M

Q4 '23

~$45M

Q1 '24

$70M

May '24

Who paysThree customers, one headache

Waza's customer base sorts into three groups, and they look nothing alike on the surface. There are multinationals operating inside Africa - a US airline, for instance, that collects fares in local currency and needs to repatriate and settle abroad. There are importers and traders buying from suppliers in India, China and the UK, who live or die by how fast and how cheaply they can pay. And there are fintechs and developers who do not want to be in the payments business themselves and simply plug into Waza's rails through an API.

What unites them is the same back-office headache from the top of this story: moving money across a border without watching fees and delays eat the deal. Waza says it serves hundreds of clients with activity spanning six continents.

The focus is affordability and speed of settlement - backed by global banking relationships and control of the payment infrastructure.Maxwell Obi, on Waza's edge

The modelHow Waza actually makes money

The business model fits on a napkin. Waza takes a spread on the foreign-exchange conversion, then adds a take rate of roughly 0.75% to 1% on the payment. At tens of millions of dollars in monthly volume, small percentages become a real revenue line. The harder part is not the pricing - it is holding enough currency in the right places to settle payments quickly. That is why Waza's $8 million seed round, announced in August 2024, was deliberately split: $3 million in equity and $5 million in venture debt from Timon Capital. Equity funds the company; debt funds the float.

Where the revenue comes from

Business pays in

Local currency

→

Waza converts

FX spread

→

+ Take rate

0.75-1%

→

Supplier paid

USD / EUR / GBP

The productFrom payments to a bank account: Lync

In January 2025, Waza shipped its second act: Lync, a multi-currency account and banking product. Where the original platform focused on moving money, Lync lets a business park it - holding balances in USD, EUR, GBP, NGN and stablecoins, and paying into more than 100 countries over ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT and local rails such as UK Faster Payments. Waza has said it is also folding trade financing into the app, including pre-shipment and invoice financing for businesses that trade internationally.

The timing was not an accident. In mid-2024, the US fintech Mercury restricted accounts for startups in 13 African countries after a compliance change, leaving a cohort of companies suddenly without a business bank. Lync walked into that gap. The design difference Waza emphasizes is direct banking access rather than a wallet routed through intermediary accounts, which it argues makes reconciliation cleaner and settlement faster.

Lync vs. a typical wallet product

	Waza / Lync	Wallet-based rival
Account type	Direct banking access	Pooled intermediary
Reconciliation	Per-account, cleaner	Harder to trace
Currencies	USD, EUR, GBP, NGN, stablecoins	Often limited
Rails	ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, local	Varies

The marketA big, awkward, unloved number

The market Waza is aiming at is enormous and, by most accounts, poorly served. The company frames it as a roughly $7 trillion flow with a $250 billion revenue pool - the money that emerging-market businesses push across borders every year to pay for goods and services. Incumbent banks find these corridors expensive and risky to serve; that difficulty is precisely the moat. If moving money into and out of these markets were easy, it would already be a solved problem and a crowded one.

It is not entirely empty, of course. Waza shares the field with cross-border B2B players like AZA Finance, Verto and Conduit, and with business-banking names like Mercury and Brex on the account side. Its differentiation is the combination: owning banking relationships and infrastructure rather than reselling someone else's, which is what lets it argue on both price and settlement speed at once.

The peopleOperators, not tourists

The team - around 20 people, working remote-first - is stacked with fintech alumni from Revolut, Sendwave, Moniepoint, FairMoney and Carbon. For a company whose product is regulatory relationships and settlement mechanics, that pedigree is not a vanity line on a pitch deck; it is the shortest path through the parts of this business that take years to learn. The investor list reads similarly: Y Combinator, Byld Ventures, Norrsken Africa, Heirloom VC, Plug and Play Tech Center and Olive Tree Capital on the equity side, with Timon Capital providing the venture debt.

Will any of this matter in ten years? The honest answer is that infrastructure companies are judged on durability, not launches. Waza has shown it can grow volume and add a second product without losing the plot. The open questions are the ones every payments company faces at scale - regulation across many jurisdictions, credit risk as it moves into financing, and whether it can keep undercutting rivals once it is no longer the scrappy newcomer. For now, the line on the chart is still pointing up, and the problem it solves is not going anywhere.