Nigerian fintech company Kredete, which builds financial infrastructure tailored for Africans in the diaspora, has acquired Gravv, a platform that uses stablecoins to move money across borders in real time. The deal marks a major step toward making cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more reliable for Africans at home and abroad.
More About Kredete
Kredete was founded in 2022 by Adeola Adedewe, a Nigerian entrepreneur who moved to the United States to study more than fifteen years ago. He experienced firsthand how difficult and costly it was to send money home and build a financial life in a new country. That experience led him to build Kredete, a platform designed to help African immigrants and diaspora communities send money home, build credit, and access financial tools that the traditional banking system often ignores.
Today, Kredete serves more than 6.5 million users and has processed over $18 billion in annualised payments. It enables users to send money to more than 60 countries and offers what it describes as Africa’s first stablecoin-backed credit card, built in partnership with Visa and Stellar. The card lets users spend US dollar-backed stablecoins at more than 150 million merchants worldwide.
What Gravv Brings to the Table
Gravv is not a household name, but it is a serious player in the infrastructure behind global payments. It connects banks, blockchain networks, and local payment systems through a single integration. In simple terms, Gravv is the plumbing that makes money move across borders using stablecoins—digital currencies pegged to the US dollar—instead of the old, slow correspondent banking system.
Gravv has processed more than $3 billion in annualised volume for over 1,000 businesses across more than 100 countries, supported by seven global banking partners. Its platform handles multi-currency accounts, foreign exchange, liquidity management, payment routing, and reconciliation—all in real time. For businesses operating across several African markets, this means they no longer have to work with separate providers for each part of a payment.
Why This Deal Is Important for Africa
Sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa is the most expensive in the world. According to a report by Africa Reporters Network, Africa received $96.4 billion in remittances in 2024, and a huge portion of that money is lost to fees. The average cost of sending $200 to the region stood at 8.78% in the first quarter of 2025, well above the global average of 6.49%
By bringing Gravv’s technology in-house, Kredete gains direct control over stablecoin settlement, multi-currency accounts, foreign exchange, liquidity, routing, and reconciliation across global rails. This means Kredete can process payments faster and at a lower cost, without relying on multiple third-party providers. The savings can be passed on to users, making it cheaper for Africans in the diaspora to support their families back home.
More importantly, Kredete is opening Gravv’s infrastructure to other banks, fintechs, platforms, and developers serving emerging markets. Any African fintech building cross-border payment solutions can now build directly on Kredete’s infrastructure, instead of piecing together connections to multiple banks and blockchain networks. This could accelerate innovation across the continent’s fintech ecosystem.
The Role of AI in the New Payment System
One of the most interesting aspects of the acquisition is Gravv’s “agentic” layer. This is a system powered by artificial intelligence that monitors liquidity, selects the best payment routes, manages foreign exchange, and reconciles transactions automatically. Instead of human beings manually coordinating payments across different banks and blockchain networks, the system does it in real time.
Ebuka Arinze, Kredete’s Chief Product Officer, believes that AI agents will eventually initiate and process a large share of global commerce.
“The next trillion dollars in commerce will be initiated and processed by AI agents,” he said. “We are now building the financial infrastructure agents will need to participate in the global economy.”
For African businesses, this means payments can be routed through the cheapest and fastest channels automatically, without the delays and errors that come with manual processing.
Read Also: AI Infrastructure Startup, AethexAI Secures $3 Million in Pre-Seed Funding
What This Means for the Evolution of African Payments
Kredete’s acquisition of Gravv is more than just a business deal. It is a signal that African fintech companies are no longer just building consumer apps—they are building the infrastructure that powers global money movement.
Stablecoins are becoming an increasingly important tool for cross-border payments in Africa. Crypto adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa grew by 52% in the 12 months through June 2025, with the region receiving over $205 billion in on-chain value. Major players like Circle are partnering with African fintechs to expand stablecoin adoption, and Mastercard is working with Yellow Card to lower remittance costs.
Kredete’s move to bring stablecoin infrastructure in-house puts it in a strong position to compete in this rapidly growing market. By controlling the entire payment chain—from the diaspora sender to the African recipient—Kredete can offer better prices, faster settlement, and greater reliability than platforms that depend on external providers.
Adeola Adedewe puts it simply: “Infrastructure is the moat, and intelligence is the operating layer. Together, we are building the autonomous middleware for global money movement.”
For Africans who send and receive money across borders every day, this is more than just tech jargon. It is a promise of a future where sending money home does not mean losing a significant portion to fees, and where payments arrive in minutes, not days.
