An African business paying an overseas supplier rarely does it in one step. It stitches the transfer together across banks, foreign-exchange providers and crypto services, a patchwork that is slow, expensive, and hard to track from end to end. Daya has raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding to collapse that into a single rail, building stablecoin-based payment infrastructure for companies that move money across borders. Hivemind Capital led the round, joined by Lattice, Alliance, Globelink and the Aptos Foundation.
What Daya built
Daya’s platform brings receiving, converting and sending into one interface, with stablecoins as the settlement layer underneath and a routing engine that picks among different rails to keep each transaction fast and cheap. The detail that shows its ambition is the account structure. Daya issues virtual accounts in major currencies, including US dollars, Hong Kong dollars and Chinese yuan, the last two aimed squarely at the China trade that so many African importers depend on. It also exposes APIs, so other fintechs can build cross-border payments into their own products rather than rebuild the rails themselves.
The team and the backers
The founders are central to why investors leaned in. Nigerian entrepreneurs Aleph L and Paul Joe previously built Helicarrier, a Y Combinator-backed crypto exchange and remittance platform, and have worked at Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, and at Microsoft. That is a team that has shipped both crypto infrastructure and payments at scale, not a first-time crew learning the space on the round. In a category where the technology is rarely the hardest part, that operating history carries much of the case.
One backer is worth singling out. The Aptos Foundation, which supports development on the Aptos blockchain, came in as a strategic investor, pointing to demand for faster settlement and better dollar liquidity in emerging markets. A blockchain foundation backing a payments company is a bet that real cross-border volume will move over stablecoin rails, and that Daya can be one of the places it moves. It also gives Daya a technical partner rather than only a cheque.
A crowded lane
Daya lands in a crowded but fast-growing lane. Stablecoins have become one of the most active areas of African fintech precisely because hard currency is constrained and conventional cross-border rails are slow and dear, and a string of companies are now building settlement infrastructure rather than consumer wallets. What separates the serious attempts is focus: Daya is business-to-business plumbing, virtual accounts and APIs that other firms pay to use, which is a more durable place to sit than a retail app competing for downloads.
Paul Joe framed the bet as making cross-border payments “as seamless and programmable as modern software,” and the line captures where the value is meant to accrue, not in any single transfer but in becoming the layer other products are built on. The hard part, as always in payments, is trust and volume, persuading businesses to route real money through a young platform before it has a long record. A repeat team, a design that joins stablecoin and fiat rails, and currency accounts pointed at Africa’s largest trading partner are a sharper starting hand than most pre-seed companies hold.
