For a Nigerian company that needs dollars, the hard part is often not the exchange rate but the hunt for the currency itself. A treasury team calls several banks and payment providers, compares quotes, waits for approvals, and by the time everyone has responded the rate has moved and the process starts over. Stabyl has left stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed round, led by the e-commerce company Konga, to take that friction out of how financial institutions source foreign exchange.
The problem is one of plumbing, not only scarcity. Nigeria recorded a net foreign-exchange inflow of $6.92 billion in February 2026, by the Central Bank’s own monthly figures, yet the infrastructure that moves that liquidity is fragmented, with banks, payment service providers and large institutions each running their own web of relationships to find currency. Stabyl is built for that gap. It is a liquidity exchange for institutions, not a consumer app or a cross-border payments product, and it sits at the moment before a payment, when an institution still has to source the FX to make it.
How Stabyl works
The mechanism is the interesting part. Instead of bilateral phone calls, Stabyl runs a central limit order book, the same model that sits under a stock exchange, where buyers and sellers of foreign exchange post orders that are matched and queued automatically. Michael Anyi, the co-founder who built the system, describes the manual work of calling around and holding transactions while chasing rates as simply removed. Liquidity is aggregated from the payment providers and institutions on the platform, and Stabyl holds its own reserves with unnamed partners so that currency stays available when demand outruns what the market is naturally offering.
Underneath, Stabyl settles across both banking rails and blockchains, and it is candid that the two have to work together. For naira settlement it has partnered with KongaPay; for stablecoin settlement it uses wallet infrastructure from the provider DFNS, and it currently supports the dollar-pegged tokens USDT and USDC while staying blockchain-agnostic. Co-founder Prince Nnamdi Ekeh puts the logic plainly: “Stablecoins are great, but they’re not great on their own,” because a business still has to convert back into local currency to spend the money. For institutions that want it wired straight into their treasury systems, the company also offers APIs into its liquidity pool.
Why the backer matters
The team and the backer give the round its weight. The idea began, by the company’s account, in a conversation between two Oxford MBA students around 2021. Ekeh was then co-CEO of Konga Group, after merging in his own marketplace Yudala, and saw the FX problem from inside a large operator; Zachary Schwartzman had come to African tech as a Wall Street analyst covering Jumia’s listing; Anyi brought more than a decade building financial infrastructure. That Konga led the cheque matters too. A commerce company is exactly the kind of business that sources FX constantly, so the lead investor is also a natural first user, and KongaPay is already wired in as the naira settlement partner.
The business underneath
The business model is a deliberate break from how FX is usually monetised in Nigeria. Most players earn the spread, buying currency low and selling it higher; Stabyl says it instead charges a take rate on transactions, which ties its income to moving volume rather than to holding inventory and profiting from the gap. For founders, that is the read worth taking: the durable position in African FX is not another bureau competing on spread, but neutral infrastructure that other institutions plug into and pay per use. Whether Stabyl reaches it will turn on how much liquidity it can actually pool, the hard problem for any exchange, but launching with a commerce heavyweight committed and settlement partners already in place is a real start.
