Collect Africa, a Nigerian payment platform that allows African SMEs to receive payments across all sales channels, manage and monitor their businesses, has announced plans to shut down.
The company noted that by August 31, 2025, it will cease operations as the team will now focus entirely on a new stablecoin-based platform called Autospend.
In an email to users as seen by Condia, the company wrote,
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“After much consideration, we have made the difficult decision to wind down the business”. It further informed customers to withdraw all remaining funds from their accounts ahead of the closure.
According to Collect Africa co-founder Abraham Ojes, he noted that the shutdown marks a strategic shift rather than an end. “After four years of building Collect and helping hundreds of merchants manage payments, we saw firsthand how big the need is for global, instant, and affordable money movement,” he said.
This realization led to Autospend, a new startup launched earlier in 2025, which enables businesses and individuals to move money using stablecoins for payments, savings, and expense management. Ojes describes it as “the next chapter of what we’ve been building all along.”
Collect Africa was founded in 2021 by Abraham Ojes and Wale Martins with a simple mission to help businesses collect payments seamlessly from their customers all over Africa.
The company launched with the belief that customers should be given the freedom to pay with whatever methods they are used to. Collect goal was to connect businesses to local payment methods and improve acceptance rates.
The startup built tools that enabled SMEs to accept payments via bank transfers, POS terminals, QR codes, payment links, and direct debits all from a single dashboard. Also, it sought to offer a better alternative to Nigeria’s fragmented payment systems for small businesses.
The platform positioned itself as the best way for businesses to accept recurring payments, offering a superior payment experience through ready-made payment pages or customizable checkout options that integrated easily with existing online services.
Collect Africa focused on minimizing failed transactions by ensuring most payments were successful on the first attempt, while its smart systems automatically retried failed payments. By leveraging its technology, the company claimed to reduce the total cost of collecting, managing, and reconciling recurring payments by up to 40%.
Built on open banking infrastructure, Collect Africa connected to every bank in Nigeria through reliable service providers, with plans to expand its services to Kenya and South Africa. The platform offered various features tailored to business needs. Its invoicing solution allowed customers to securely set up their payment details once, enabling businesses to collect both one-off and recurring payments as they became due.
Subscription payments gave merchants the flexibility to create custom billing schedules, accessible via secure payment links or directly from the Collect dashboard. To enhance cashflow management, Collect Africa also provided businesses with dedicated accounts, enabling faster collections, instant settlements, and better access to business insights. Through the dashboard, businesses could create an unlimited number of dedicated accounts for different units without the need for any paperwork.
Over its years of operation, Collect Africa became a trusted payment solution for businesses of various sizes, streamlining payment processes and improving overall efficiency in financial management. Since launch, the startup has processed over $4 million in payments, registered 5,000 businesses, and facilitated more than 50,000 transactions.
It maintained monthly revenues of about $5,000 and recorded an average annual growth rate of 25%, according to early-stage investor Ajim Capital. The company also attracted backing from prominent investors.
Collect Africa’s closure reflects a broader trend among African fintechs, moving away from local payment tools toward infrastructure that supports cross-border financial access. The company’s pivot reflects the belief that stablecoin will become the future of money movement in Africa.
With Autospend, the founders are betting that stablecoins will play a key role in the future of global money movement on the continent.