Daya, a Nigerian fintech focused on stablecoin, has raised $2.4 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Hivemind Capital, with support from Lattice Fund, Alliance, Globelink Holding, and Aptos Foundation.
Launched just eight months ago, Daya aims to create a financial operating layer for African businesses engaged in cross-border transactions and is experiencing over 40% month-on-month growth in 2026.
The founding story behind Daya is both personal and structural. Co-founder Tomiwa “Aleph” Lasebikan former Chief Product Officer at Helicarrier, the Y Combinator-backed crypto startup, and ex-Principal PM at Circle, first encountered crypto in 2014, when he used Bitcoin to send money home to Lagos from Seattle while working at Microsoft.
“It was a much better experience than Western Union, but it was a painful and convoluted p2p process built for developers and nerds, not for my parents,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
He quit Microsoft in 2018 and spent the next seven years at Helicarrier and Circle trying to understand how blockchain technology could become useful and accessible to everyday Africans. Daya, he says, is the culmination of that decade.
His co-founder, Paul Joe, brings experience from Circle, Microsoft and Helicarrier. Their combined background spans the full stack of what Daya is building (stablecoin infrastructure, developer APIs, financial compliance and the operational reality of African cross-border payments).
The Problem They Are Solving
More than 80 percent of intra-African cross-border payments settle in USD or EUR, currencies the businesses involved do not hold or earn in. African businesses pay average fees of 9 percent per transaction, compared to 6 percent globally. Settlement takes days. Businesses have zero visibility into where their money is.
“The median age across Africa is 19,” Lasebikan said, “with the vast majority of our citizens growing up on the back of smartphones and the internet. While most Africans are now connected to the rich terrain of information in the world, we are still disconnected from the global financial landscape and stablecoins fix this.”
Daya’s platform consolidates a sprawling patchwork of local banks, FX desks, crypto ramps, payment processors, and manual spreadsheets into a single dashboard.
Businesses collect locally, convert smartly and settle globally, routing each transaction through the best available rail automatically. Virtual multi-currency accounts in USD, HKD and CNY, smart FX routing, compliance tools and a developer API complete the stack.
Paul Joe framed the product thesis sharply:
“The winners in this market will not just own the payment rails, they will own the workflows. We want cross-border payments to feel like modern software: programmable, transparent, compliant and fast.”
What the Investors Are Betting On
Hivemind Capital’s Kayla Phillips described Daya as “the gateway for African businesses of all sizes to engage in the global dollar economy,” adding that “Daya’s stablecoin-native architecture provides African businesses with the financial services they’ve long demanded, access to 24/7 global financial rails, instant settlement, and programmability at a fraction of the costs they incur today.”
Hivemind framed the opportunity in three numbers (smartphone penetration across Africa hits 87 percent by 2030, crypto adoption grew 25x since 2021, African fintech is expected to grow 13x through 2030).
Globelink Holding’s CIO Kent Cai pointed to the trade corridor that makes the addressable market impossible to dismiss. Africa exported $189.5 billion in goods to Asia in 2024, while Asia accounted for 28.5 percent of Africa’s $769 billion in imports, implying more than $400 billion in annual two-way trade-linked payment flows between the two regions.
“The Asia-Africa corridor alone shows the scale of the opportunity,” he said.
Lasebikan said, “The mission of Daya is to open Africa to global financial markets, and stablecoins are going to be at the forefront of it. For the first time, we have internet-native dollars that can move across borders with the speed, cost, and programmability of software. That changes what is possible for African businesses.”
What Comes Next
In June 2026, Daya launched a pilot stablecoin payment corridor connecting Africa and the UAE with Aptos Foundation and HashKey MENA, running on the Aptos blockchain.
The company will use the fresh capital to expand corridors including Nigeria-China and Kenya-India, secure regulatory licences and build out compliance infrastructure.
Before this round, Daya raised $350,000 from Alliance DAO in 2025.
Going from that to an oversubscribed $2.4 million pre-seed in under a year, at 40 percent-plus monthly growth, is the traction curve that attracts Series A attention fast.
The global B2B cross-border payments market is projected to reach $47.8 trillion by 2032. Daya is building for Africa’s share of it and for the first time, the infrastructure to claim it actually exists.
