Stabyl, a Nigerian exchange platform that allows banks, PSPs, and traders to access deep FX stablecoin liquidity, has emerged from Stealth to raise $2.7 million in pre-seed funding.
The funding round was led by Konga, which will also become Stabyl’s first real-world implementation partner.
By leveraging established fiat capabilities through KongaPay’s licensed rails and pairing them with robust, institutional-grade crypto infrastructure, Stabyl provides predictable execution that reduces FX risk.
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Although many payment companies across Africa can collect and move funds with relative ease, the process of sourcing foreign exchange before settlement remains highly fragmented.
Treasury teams often rely on manual processes, contacting banks, payment providers, and liquidity partners individually to compare exchange rates and secure liquidity.
Stabyl aims to eliminate this inefficiency through a central limit order book, where buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders in a transparent marketplace. The platform is designed to streamline FX sourcing while improving price discovery and execution speed
Notably, in the world of cross-border payments, the company has accepted this paradox that information moves instantly, but capital moves slowly. While a Payment Service Provider (PSP) can confirm a transaction in milliseconds via a chat or API, the actual settlement may take days to reflect. This delay creates what is known as “trapped capital” in modern financial markets.
As financial technology evolves, the institutions that will enjoy the advantages of advanced technology will be those that don’t treat liquidity as a static pool but rather as something that is capable of depth and movement.
Stabyl provides a unified layer for instant settlement and real-time price discovery by enabling its partners to move capital at the speed of information and to turn trapped float into a powerful engine for global commerce.
Co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, Stabyl, is a technology company building liquidity and settlement infrastructure for stablecoin and foreign exchange transactions.
The company’s leadership team is made up of experienced business leaders, financial analysts, and technical experts.
Stabyyl’s solution is to replace those fragmented bilateral negotiations with a central limit order book (CLOB), in which buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders.
The fintech is neither a consumer-facing app nor a cross-border payments platform. The problem it aims to solve lies at the point where financial institutions source foreign exchange before a payment can be made.
The company’s co-founder Ekeh illustrated this with the example of a large institution like Konga. He explained that when the e-commerce company needs foreign exchange, its treasury team typically reaches out to multiple banks, payment service providers, and liquidity providers to compare rates and source liquidity.
By the time approvals are received and counterparties respond, market prices may already have shifted, forcing the process to begin again or settle at a less favourable rate.
The startup disclosed that its liquidity is aggregated from participating payment service providers (PSPs) and financial institutions, and maintains its own liquidity reserves with unnamed selected partners to ensure liquidity remains available when demand exceeds natural market activity.
On Stabyl, settlement occurs across both traditional banking infrastructure and blockchain networks. For fiat transactions, Stabyl noted that it partnered with KongaPay as its official naira settlement partner. On the stablecoin settlement side, wallet infrastructure is provided by DFNS, a multi-party computation (MPC) wallet provider.
The company noted that it currently supports USDT (Tether) and USDC (USD Coin) stablecoins. Still, it maintained that its infrastructure is blockchain-agnostic, selecting networks based on cost, speed, settlement finality, and the needs of its institutional clients.
While many fintech startups compete for consumer attention with payment apps and cross-border transfer services, the platform is taking a different approach by building the infrastructure that powers the financial ecosystem behind the scenes.
Rather than serving end users directly, Stabyl is focused on solving one of the most overlooked challenges in African fintech: foreign exchange liquidity. The company’s mission is to become the liquidity backbone for Africa’s PSPs and liquidity providers.