Sourcing foreign exchange remains one of the biggest challenge facing businesses operating across Africa today. They struggle to find available foreign currency to settle international bills and pay suppliers when needed. To tackle this specific problem, a new Nigerian-founded financial technology startup named Stabyl has stepped forward.
The company has officially announced that it has raised $2.7 million in pre-seed funding. This early-stage funding round was led by Konga, one of Nigeria’s largest e-commerce platforms. Konga will also act as the startup’s very first real-world testing and local currency settlement partner through its payment arm, KongaPay.
The fresh funding comes at a crucial time for the continent’s digital economy. As local businesses grow, they desperately need quicker, more reliable ways to handle international transactions without getting stuck in long financial delays.
The founding team at Stabyl brings together a mix of international business strategy and African financial engineering expertise, which is highly visible in their cooperative approach to resolving institutional currency friction.
What is the Foreign Exchange Liquidity Gap?
To understand why Stabyl’s new funding matters, it helps to look at what happens behind the scenes of cross-border payments. Most people are familiar with consumer apps that allow individuals to send money to relatives abroad or pay for online subscriptions. However, Stabyl does not build apps for regular consumers. Instead, it focuses on the deep infrastructure that sits directly behind those transactions, serving banks, payment companies, and massive corporate institutions.
When a payment provider or a local bank wants to help a customer send money overseas, that financial institution must first secure the actual foreign currency required to complete the transfer. This immediate availability of ready cash in a specific currency is what financial experts call liquidity. In many African countries, finding this liquidity is a deeply fragmented, slow, and stressful process.
Currently, when a large firm or bank needs millions of dollars to pay international partners, its treasury teams have to work manually. Staff members must pick up the phone, call multiple banks, reach out to various currency dealers, and manually compare exchange rates to find out who has enough dollars to sell. This old-fashioned method takes a long time, completely lacks transparency, and causes massive delays. Stabyl is stepping in to build a unified digital system to bridge this structural gap.
How the Platform Automates Currency Trading
Stabyl changes this slow, manual process by replacing phone calls with software automation. The startup has built an institutional marketplace that connects multiple financial institutions and payment providers into one shared, digital pool of currency.
At the heart of their platform is a technical tool called a central limit order book. This is essentially an automatic electronic matching engine, similar to the advanced technology used by major global stock exchanges. Instead of a treasury employee calling around to find a buyer or seller, the software automatically matches institutions that want to buy foreign currency with institutions that have that currency available to sell at that exact moment.
By gathering liquidity from various participating financial institutions into a single network, Stabyl aims to create a highly accessible pool of foreign exchange on the continent. Businesses using the system will no longer need to bargain separately with multiple individual banks. They can simply connect to the platform and let the system find the best match automatically.
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Combining Traditional Banking with Stablecoins
One of the most modern aspects of Stabyl is how it settles these massive financial transactions. The platform does not rely solely on traditional commercial banking networks, which can sometimes take days to move money across African borders. Instead, it smoothly combines traditional banking systems with digital currencies known as stablecoins.
Stablecoins are digital assets that are tied directly to the value of a traditional currency, usually the US dollar. Stabyl supports widely used stablecoins like USDT and USDC. By using these digital assets, institutions can settle their currency trades almost instantly, skipping the traditional clearing delays that plague older systems.
To ensure that everything is highly secure and meets strict corporate safety standards, Stabyl has partnered with a specialised digital asset custody company called DFNS. DFNS provides advanced wallet security technology to safeguard digital funds during the trading process. This combination allows African businesses to choose whichever settlement method is fastest and most reliable for their specific trade.
Stabyl Unlocks a Different Way to Make Money in FX
In the traditional foreign exchange market, currency traders make their money through what is called a spread. This means they buy a currency at a lower price and sell it to the customer at a higher price, keeping the difference as their profit. This common practice often drives up hidden costs for businesses that desperately need foreign exchange to survive.
Stabyl is taking a completely different approach to its business model. The company does not make money from exchange rate differences or spreads. Instead, it charges a flat, transparent transaction fee for every trade that is processed through its network.
The founders believe that by keeping transaction costs low and predictable, more banks and financial firms will choose to route their high-volume trades through Stabyl. The ultimate goal is not to steal market share from existing banks, but rather to grow the overall size of the market by making foreign currency easier to access for every player involved.
A Profile of Stabyl’s Founders and Their Journey
The story of Stabyl started a few years ago in the United Kingdom. Co-founders Prince Nnamdi Ekeh and Zachary Schwartzman first began discussing the chaotic state of African foreign exchange while they were classmates studying for their Master of Business Administration degrees at the University of Oxford between 2021 and 2022. Both shared a strong belief that stablecoin technology could fix the deep-seated friction in how African countries trade currencies.
To turn their vision into a commercial product, they later partnered with Michael Anyi, a technical expert with deep experience in building complex financial infrastructure. Together, the three co-founders have guided the company through its early development to this major funding milestone.
The startup is launching at a very favourable time due to recent regulatory shifts within Nigeria. The Central Bank of Nigeria previously placed strict limits on how local banks could interact with digital assets, but those restrictions have since been lifted. Furthermore, local financial regulators have started creating a clear, formal framework for virtual asset companies.
Stabyl plans to use its new $2.7 million to secure official licenses, ensure full legal compliance, and strengthen its core engineering team. While the company is starting its journey by perfecting the trade route between the Nigerian Naira and the US dollar, the team already has plans to expand to other currency pairings across the African continent in the near future.
