Konga Leads $2.7M Pre-Seed Round in FX Infrastructure Startup Stabyl
Konga has led a $2.7 million pre-seed round in Stabyl, a startup building central limit order book infrastructure for African banks and payment companies to source foreign exchange — not a consumer stablecoin product, but back-end FX matching infrastructure settling through both KongaPay and blockchain rails.
Lagos, Nigeria — E-commerce group Konga has led a $2.7 million pre-seed round in Stabyl, a fintech building institutional-grade foreign exchange infrastructure for banks and payment companies across Africa. Stabyl emerged from stealth with the round, which also included participation from other investors.
Stabyl is not a consumer-facing app or a cross-border payments platform — it operates at the point where financial institutions source foreign exchange before a payment can be made. Its core product is a central limit order book (CLOB) that lets buyers and sellers of foreign exchange automatically post and match orders, replacing the fragmented bilateral negotiations banks and payment companies currently rely on. The company was founded by Prince Nnamdi Ekeh (former Co-CEO of Konga Group), Zachary Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi.
Settlement on Stabyl runs across both traditional banking rails and blockchain networks: KongaPay serves as Stabyl's official naira settlement partner for fiat transactions, while stablecoin settlement (currently USDT and USDC) runs through wallet infrastructure from DFNS, a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet provider. The platform currently focuses on the naira-dollar corridor, with plans to expand to additional African currency pairs.
Africa's foreign exchange market has long been fragmented, with banks and payment companies sourcing FX through manual, bilateral relationships rather than a shared order book — a structural inefficiency that drives up costs and settlement delays across the continent's payment rails. By investing directly and becoming Stabyl's first real-world settlement partner through KongaPay, Konga is betting that centralized FX matching infrastructure, not just faster payment rails, is the next layer of African fintech worth owning.
Konga's investment in Stabyl highlights a significant trend of retail platforms bypassing traditional payment gateways in favor of decentralized stablecoin settlement. This strategic move directly reduces checkout friction and currency volatility risks for large-scale merchants. Investors should note that e-commerce giants are now actively funding their own payment protocols to defend unit margins. The main risk lies in regulatory policy shifts, as the Central Bank of Nigeria closely monitors stablecoin transactions and retail payment licenses.
Lemina Kelvett News
✓ VERIFIEDLemina Kelvett's newsroom covers fundraising pipelines, financial services policy, and private asset valuations across African technology hubs — verified against the platform's underlying company data.