StellarPay raises $40M to make cross-border payments invisible

StellarPay, the Lagos-headquartered cross-border payments company founded by Amara Okafor, has closed a $40 million Series A led by Tiger Global, with participation from Sequoia Africa, Ribbit, and existing investors Y Combinator and Future Africa. The round values the three-year-old company at $320 million post-money.

It is the largest Series A raised by a Nigerian fintech this year — and one of the largest by a female-founded company on the continent in any year on record.

The round

Sources close to the company say the round was significantly oversubscribed; Okafor turned away roughly $90 million of additional commitments. The lead investor, Tiger Global's growth team, has been increasingly active in African fintech over the past four quarters after a multi-year pullback. People familiar with the deal said the firm moved quickly after a board observer seat was offered.

"This round wasn't about needing the capital," Okafor said by phone from Lagos. "It was about choosing the people we want to be in this for the next ten years."

What StellarPay does

The company's product is, at a surface level, unremarkable: an API that businesses and consumers use to send money across African borders. The complexity sits underneath. StellarPay holds local-currency floats in twenty-three countries, integrates directly with central-bank settlement systems in fifteen, and operates physical agent networks in eight more. The result is end-to-end remittance settlement that — the company claims — closes in under nine seconds on the median transaction.

The customer base skews B2B. The largest line of revenue is now disbursing payroll and supplier payments for Pan-African corporates; consumer-facing volume runs through partner wallets rather than a StellarPay-branded app.

Why investors are paying attention

The narrative that drew Tiger Global, according to two people close to the transaction, was the unit economics. StellarPay's gross margin on cross-border B2B flows is meaningfully higher than the comparable rails operated by global players in the region. The company has been net contribution-margin positive on every payment corridor it has launched in for at least nine months.

"This is one of the very few fintechs anywhere in emerging markets where the path to profitability isn't theoretical," said one investor who reviewed the deal. "The unit economics aren't a forecast. They're already there."

The corridors

The capital is earmarked for three things: expanding into thirty additional country corridors, building out treasury and FX hedging infrastructure, and a significant senior engineering hire. Okafor named the senior hires already in conversation — a former cross-border payments executive from a major US fintech, and a treasury operator who built the corresponding function at a leading European bank — but asked that the names be held until contracts are signed.

The corridor expansion is the bigger signal. StellarPay's bet is that the future of African commerce runs on a single integrated payment layer, not on dozens of locally-owned wallets stitched together by correspondent banking. That bet has plenty of skeptics — including some of Okafor's earliest backers — but the company's traction has answered the technical doubt. The strategic question now is whether StellarPay can win regulatory ground faster than the incumbents can defend it.

What's next

The company is hiring across operations, compliance, and engineering. A Series B is "definitely on the table, but not for at least eighteen months," Okafor said. By then the company expects to be running flow across more than fifty corridors and serving customers in five regional markets outside Africa.

For more on the founders building Africa's next financial layer, read our recent interview with Amara Okafor and our Funding Watch section.