Last updated on July 21st, 2026 at 11:51 am
Nigerian fintech startup Daya has raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed funding round to expand its stablecoin-powered payment infrastructure for businesses across Africa. The round was led by Hivemind Capital, with participation from Lattice, Alliance, Globelink, and Aptos Foundation.
The funding will support the development of Daya’s platform, which combines stablecoin settlement, fiat on- and off-ramps, multi-currency accounts, treasury management tools, and compliance infrastructure into a single system designed for cross-border business payments.
The fundraising comes as stablecoins continue to gain traction as a practical settlement layer for international commerce, particularly in regions where businesses face high foreign exchange costs, slow banking processes, and limited access to dollar liquidity.
Why African businesses are stuck using banks that weren’t built for them
Founded in 2025 by Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan and Paul Joe, Daya is building what it describes as a financial operating system for African businesses. The platform aims to simplify how companies receive payments, manage treasury balances, access foreign currency liquidity, and settle transactions across multiple markets.
The cost of the alternative is well documented. World Bank data shows that it costs an average of $15.60, or 7.8%, to send $200 to or from Sub-Saharan Africa, the most expensive region in the world for that kind of transfer, with some countries seeing costs as high as 19%. For a business moving tens of thousands of dollars to pay a supplier abroad, that is not a rounding error, it is a direct hit to margin on every single transaction, layered on top of the delays that come from routing payments through multiple correspondent banks.
This is the gap Daya is positioning stablecoin settlement to close, not by replacing banks outright, but by giving businesses a faster on-and-off-ramp around the slowest parts of that chain. The company’s recent partnership with Aptos Foundation and HashKey MENA, piloting a stablecoin settlement corridor between Africa and the Middle East, is a direct test of that thesis: convert local currency to stablecoins, settle on-chain, and deliver funds in local currency at the destination, cutting out several of the intermediaries that traditionally slow the process down.
Stablecoins are becoming boring, and that’s exactly why investors are funding them
Daya’s raise fits a pattern that is already visible in how some of Africa’s earliest crypto exchanges have repositioned themselves. Yellow Card spent its first few years building a retail trading app, the kind of product most people picture when they hear “crypto exchange.” But after reaching 1 million retail customers by 2021, the company found that handling small individual users was barely sustainable, since every customer required the same sanction screening, KYC, and chain analysis checks regardless of how much they traded, while margins on small retail volume stayed thin. Businesses, by contrast, moved far larger volumes and paid higher fees, so Yellow Card deliberately raised its minimum transaction amounts to shrink its retail base and grow its appeal to companies using the platform to manage treasury and access stablecoins. That pivot was significant enough that Yellow Card later raised $33 million led by Blockchain Capital specifically to scale the B2B side of the business.
Quidax and Busha have followed a similar trajectory. Both companies operated B2B API payment products quietly for years before pushing them publicly, with Quidax running its B2B API since 2022 but only marketing it aggressively after securing a regulatory licence, deliberately scaling slowly until it built confidence in what it had built. Across all three exchanges, the direction is the same: the transition toward businesses shows demand from African fintechs that want to offer crypto-based payments without taking on the regulatory burden of building that infrastructure themselves.
Daya differs from this pattern in one structural way. Where Yellow Card, Quidax, and Busha began as retail trading platforms and added business infrastructure later, Daya launched as a business payments platform from day one. That approach was shaped directly by founder Tomiwa Lasebikan’s earlier experience at Helicarrier (formerly BuyCoins), a retail exchange that underwent its own shift toward enterprise customers, where he repeatedly saw that users were showing up not for crypto itself, but for a faster way to receive dollars and pay suppliers abroad.
For Daya specifically, the funding gives it room to expand its payment network and deepen its position before larger, better-capitalized competitors move into the same corridor. More broadly, the raise shows where investor capital has already been moving among established players in the space, away from consumer trading and toward stablecoin infrastructure built for business treasury and settlement.
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