In 2017, Flutterwave was a company of about 50 people that had convinced Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing company, to trust its payments infrastructure to process transactions across African markets. The company was small enough for employees to understand what other teams were doing and step in when needed. 

“I had just learned about a payment company that was looking to do amazing things on the continent,” Kanyinsola Ajibade, investor relations lead, who joined Flutterwave that year, told TechCabal in an interview. 

Flutterwave’s story began in 2016, when its co-founder, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, encountered a problem while working in financial services. After stints at PayPal, GTBank, a tier-one Nigerian bank, and South Africa’s Standard Bank, Agboola was frustrated by how difficult it was for businesses to move money across African markets.

“If I want to send money to Ghana, does money have to move from Lagos to New York, and from New York to Ghana?” he told McKinsey in 2022. “It didn’t make sense to me. If you get on a plane from Lagos to Ghana, you get there faster than doing a money transfer.” 

The problem wasn’t that Africa lacked payment systems, but that those systems didn’t work seamlessly together. Businesses expanding across borders had to navigate different banks, payment methods, and settlement arrangements, making it harder to collect payments and move money between markets. 

For a merchant in Johannesburg selling to a customer in Nigeria, cross-border payments meant relying on a SWIFT transfer and waiting for confirmation before releasing the goods. SWIFT messages could take up to 48 hours as they passed through correspondent banks, frustrating instant trade. Agboola wanted to make those transactions faster and easier.

“Those were the driving forces behind Flutterwave: How do we become like a butterfly that can create a ripple effect in the ecosystem and still be tiny, yet we can make waves? Hence the name Flutterwave, ” he told McKinsey in 2022. 

Meanwhile, Iyin Aboyeji, a co-founder of Andela, a global tech talent network, faced the same problem while trying to support African developers and their businesses and had the same conclusion: without payments infrastructure, promising businesses would struggle to grow their revenue.

“A lot of our talents were desirous of building products, but when I would look at the ideas they came up with, it was very clear to me that if we didn’t have payments, many of those products could not scale revenue as fast,” Aboyeji, Flutterwave’s first chief executive officer, told TechCabal in an interview.

Their ambition became Flutterwave, a payments technology company Agboola founded while at Access Bank, a tier-one Nigerian bank, with Aboyeji and Adeleke Adekoya, then Access Bank’s head of digital banking. The idea was to connect merchants to banks, card networks such as Visa and Mastercard, and other payment providers through a single Application Programming Interface (API)—a tool that lets different apps and computer systems talk to each other—allowing businesses to collect and disburse money without building separate integrations for every market.

A decade later, Flutterwave says it has processed over $50 billion in transactions, serves more than two million businesses, and has expanded beyond payment processing into remittances, consumer payments, and banking. Aboyeji has left the company, and Flutterwave is now pursuing a wider financial-infrastructure strategy while working towards profitability and a potential public listing.

The infrastructure problem

In 2016, Nigeria's electronic payment infrastructure processed ₦65.16 trillion ($257.04 billion at ₦253.50/$) and included bank cards, ATMs, and the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System Instant Payment service. But those rails did not mean businesses could easily accept payments online, manage failed transactions, or expand into other African markets.

Interswitch, founded in 2002, had built Webpay, the default payment processor for businesses by 2015. But merchants faced integration costs of ₦150,000 ($3,068.74 at ₦195.52/$); it did not work on mobile phones, and some startups reported transaction failure rates as high as 90%.

Paystack, founded in 2015 and publicly launched in January 2016, emerged from this gap. It approached the problem by making online payments easier for Nigerian businesses to integrate and manage. Flutterwave addressed a related but broader opportunity: connecting payment systems across countries, banks, and payment methods so businesses could accept and settle funds across multiple markets.

“When we started, Africa’s payment landscape was completely fragmented. The hardest part was building an infrastructure from scratch that could securely handle transactions across totally different markets,” Agboola told TechCabal in an email response. 

Flutterwave wanted to build infrastructure that connected the different payment methods, banks, and financial systems businesses needed to reach customers across Africa. Its JavaScript API would give merchants and payment service providers a common integration through which they could accept cards, bank transfers, and local alternatives across multiple markets, rather than build each connection separately. 

The proposition was that businesses should not have to understand the underlying complexity of African payments to sell to customers in different countries.

But Flutterwave still had to earn trust, and that meant proving it could move money fast and securely. That prompted the team to travel to San Francisco for a deal of a lifetime, at the time. 

“Onboarding a global giant like Uber early on also helped build further trust with prospective customers. When other businesses saw that Uber trusted us to process their payments, it made choosing Flutterwave a much easier decision,” Agboola said. 

It wasn’t only Uber that gave the fintech credibility. Access Bank's PayWithCapture, a QR-code payment product launched in 2015. Both needed technical infrastructure that connected their products to the payment systems customers used. 

For Uber, Flutterwave worked with Access Bank to develop a solution for local payment processing. With PayWithCapture, it had an opportunity to help a bank extend a product it had already launched but lacked the technical capacity to scale. 

“Pay with Capture was a very pivotal moment, as first-time clients, as well as processing for Uber,” Aboyeji said. “Pay with Capture was a digital banking proposition that didn't have the capability or technical talent to build without OTT.” 

These early relationships helped Flutterwave demonstrate that banks and businesses could use its technical infrastructure to make their existing products work. They also offered a route into a market where a new payments company needed more than a working API: Access Bank provided a connection to the banking system, while Uber offered a practical test of whether that arrangement could solve a global merchant's local payments problem.

Building trust

Flutterwave could build an API, but software alone could not make money move across Africa. Banks held funds, licenced institutions performed regulated functions, and settlement depended on commercial and technical arrangements that varied across markets. Before it could offer businesses a simpler payments experience, the company had to persuade financial institutions to work with a young technology provider and trust it with critical parts of their operations.

“In payment processing, you need banking relationships because banks are licenced to hold funds, are licenced to acquire,” Temiloluwa Adesina, Flutterwave’s deputy chief product officer for retail, told TechCabal. 

Beyond convincing banks or regulators, Flutterwave had to prove that it could make the entire ecosystem safer and more efficient. “The biggest lesson for us was that tech alone doesn't scale on this continent; deep trust and regulatory partnerships do,” Agboola said. 

Its bet may not have paid off without an early relationship with Access Bank, where Agboola worked when Flutterwave started. Access Bank became the fintech’s banking partner, and late Herbert Wigwe, the founding Group CEO of Access Holding Plc, helped the fintech pitch technology companies in its early days. 

“He was the sure reference with Silicon Valley investors and gave us business that helped us grow to become Africa’s most valuable startup,” Aboyeji said in a 2024 tribute to Wigwe. 

Aboyeji told TechCabal in 2022 that Access Bank wanted to invest in Flutterwave in the early days, but couldn’t due to Nigerian banking regulations that prohibited banks from getting involved in non-banking activities.

The relationship illustrates an important feature of payments infrastructure: a new provider may simplify a merchant experience, but its service still relies on institutions that supply the underlying regulated and settlement functions.

“We were a young African company asking global brands and established local banks to rely on our technology,” Agboola said. 

Product experiments and the cost of adapting

Four years after Flutterwave started, the world shut down, forcing businesses to move online.

Globally, the World Bank found that more than 40% of adults in low- and middle-income economies who made merchant payments digitally during the pandemic had done so for the first time. In India, more than 80 million adults made their first digital merchant payment after the start of the pandemic. Electronic payments rose by 49.58% in Nigeria.

The shift created an opening for payment companies, including Flutterwave, Remita, an electronic payment platform, and fintech OPay, to move closer to the businesses whose transactions they processed.

Flutterwave launched Flutterwave Store in 2020 to help merchants create online shopfronts, display products, and accept payments while physical shops faced restrictions. It operated in 15 African countries and connected merchants to third-party logistics providers, including Sendy, a logistics and delivery platform, in Kenya and Sendbox, a logistics company, in Nigeria. Flutterwave said 20,000 businesses joined in its first 11 months.

“We wanted to be able to help people, small businesses, to … accept payments,” Ajibade said. 

The product reflected the company’s view that helping a business sell online could create more opportunities for payment activity. It also moved Flutterwave closer to the business’s daily operations than limiting its role to the moment a customer paid. Building to fit into the problem is one of Flutterwave’s core theses. 

“We are customer-obsessed, close to the ground with our customers, speaking to them,” Adesina said.

Within the company, ideation starts from market understanding: where it is going, and what the customer needs. Its broader product history reflects a company trying to find the middle ground between problem identification and sustainable demand.

Rave, later known as Flutterwave for Business, gave developers and businesses access to payment APIs. Barter offered consumers virtual dollar cards at a time when foreign-exchange restrictions and card-payment difficulties made international spending harder. Send App extended the company into cross-border remittances, while Swap was introduced to help businesses and consumers access foreign exchange.

Adesina, who started at Flutterwave helping merchants understand its APIs, describes the company’s product development process as built around understanding customer needs, studying adjacent industries, building quickly, and testing whether a solution has a sufficiently strong market.

“Once ideation happens, you need to move fast, and you need to build quickly,” he said. “We move fast in terms of bringing it to life and then validating our business in the market itself.”

That approach helps the company identify new revenue opportunities, but it also means not every product will survive when customer behaviour, operating costs, or market conditions change.

Barter was discontinued in March 2024 after years of service disruptions and card rejections. Disha, a creator-storefront platform the company acquired in 2021, paused operations indefinitely in March 2024, requiring more than 100,000 creators to move their profiles and content elsewhere.

“When you are a startup, you focus on speed and product-market fit,” Agboola said. “But when you become the infrastructure that thousands of global businesses rely on to survive, your priorities change.”

Capital financed the expansion 

Capital was difficult to secure in Flutterwave’s early years because Interswitch was already an established player in Nigeria’s electronic payments industry, and investors questioned whether another company could compete.

Aboyeji recently said the founders pitched hundreds of investors. Flutterwave raised a $230,000 seed round in August 2016, before it joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2016 cohort.

“Paystack referred us to YC,” Aboyeji told TechCabal. Paystack was the first Nigerian company to join the YC accelerator program. 

Initially, Flutterwave had to prove that it could solve the fragmentation of African payments and that the market was large enough to support the business. As the company evolved from addressing payment fragmentation to building a broader financial infrastructure, investor confidence also grew.

“Over time, one major thing that has helped us is building on investor confidence,” said Ajibade.

Flutterwave became one of Africa’s fintech unicorns after raising $170 million in a Series C round in March 2021, and it is currently worth more than $3 billion and has raised over $500 million.

Early capital helped Flutterwave build its payment infrastructure, acquire customers and establish itself in its first markets. But as the company proved that its model could work, expansion introduced new costs: entering additional countries required investment in local infrastructure, regulatory licences and the teams needed to operate in those markets.

Its subsequent funding rounds supported that expansion while allowing it to develop and deploy new products. The $35 million Series B in 2020 and $170 million Series C in 2021 came as Flutterwave sought to extend its reach across Africa and demonstrate that its payment infrastructure could be replicated across different markets. By the $250 million Series D in 2022, the company was explicitly allocating capital towards customer acquisition, expansion, complementary products and acquisitions.

As Flutterwave matured, capital also became a means to acquire capabilities rather than developing every technology in-house. Its January 2026 acquisition of open-banking startup Mono brought financial-data access, identity verification and account-to-account payment technology into its ecosystem. Ripple’s investment in the company’s June 2026 Series E round was tied to integrating Ripple’s stablecoin and payments infrastructure into its network.

Over the decade, Flutterwave has also had to prove that it can survive currency fluctuations on the continent. For instance, in Nigeria, the naira has fallen from ₦253.50/$ in 2016 to over ₦1,300/$ in 2026.  

“When you are in the African markets, you learn that you have to be resilient,”  Ajibade said. “You have to be able to build a strategy for macro changes that you might get into. I want to credit that to our finance and operations team, who were able to build core structures to help protect the business.”  

Regulation and corporate governance

Flutterwave’s expansion has brought it into increasingly complex regulatory environments, while also exposing questions about whether its internal management and governance had matured alongside its ambitions.

In April 2022, an investigation by Rest of World, the US nonprofit tech publication, documented allegations from former employees involving bullying, sexual harassment, administrative failures, and disputes over employee stock options. The reporting also raised questions about potential conflicts of interest involving shares that departing employees sold to Berrywood Capital, an investment vehicle reportedly associated with Agboola.

Flutterwave disputed several allegations, describing them as false or previously addressed, and said it had introduced policies and investigated complaints.

The episode raised doubts about a company whose commercial value depended on trust: merchants relied on it to process payments, banks depended on its technology and controls, and investors had committed capital to a business expected to operate across multiple financial systems. These allegations forced the company to become stricter with corporate governance.

“Governance naturally evolves as a company grows,” Flutterwave said in an email response to TechCabal.

Regulatory challenges soon exposed another dimension of the problem. In July 2022, Kenya's central bank said Flutterwave was not authorised to provide payment services in the country and directed regulated financial institutions to stop dealing with it. 

Separately, Kenya's Assets Recovery Agency froze funds in accounts linked to the company while investigating allegations of money laundering and fraud, which Flutterwave denied. The agency subsequently withdrew its forfeiture case, and a court ordered the release of the frozen funds in 2024. 

In September 2025, the Bank of Ghana suspended Flutterwave's remittance partnerships for one month over breaches of its inward-remittance guidelines, although the company said its other services in Ghana remained operational.

These episodes underscored the difficulty of expanding a financial-services business across jurisdictions where licensing, settlement, and remittance rules differ.

The company told TechCabal that there is no single approach to building a global financial-services business because regulation and financial infrastructure remain local.

For a payments business, regulatory disputes are more than legal expenses. Regulatory restrictions can complicate banking relationships, settlement arrangements, and the ability to serve merchants in a market. Flutterwave is exploring acquisitions to close some of these gaps. It is preparing to acquire an undisclosed bank in East Africa, with Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Egypt strategically important. 

“Every country has its own regulatory framework, licensing requirements, financial infrastructure, and policy priorities,” Flutterwave said. “One of our biggest lessons has been that to build globally, you also have to be deeply local.”

Flutterwave says it holds more than 50 licences globally, and has made changes to its leadership and compliance functions as it has grown.

“As we establish and grow businesses in different countries, we have to build structures that meet local corporate governance and regulatory requirements,... while maintaining strong group standards and global best practices,” the company said.

Flutterwave’s growth also exposed it to the fraud risk of building a payments business at scale. In October 2023, about ₦19 billion ($14.27 million) was reportedly transferred to approximately 6,000 account holders across 35 financial institutions from Flutterwave. 

In April 2024, TechCabal reported another incident in which insiders estimated that ₦11 billion ($8.26 million) had been diverted, although Flutterwave said no customer funds had been lost or compromised. Fraud cases are not strange to financial institutions; banks lost ₦5.25 billion ($3.94 million) in Q3 2025. 

The company says it monitors transactions through a 24-hour fraud desk and works with financial institutions and law enforcement to investigate suspicious activity. In 2024, Flutterwave partnered with Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to establish a cybercrime research centre. A year later, it said its security measures included encryption, tokenisation and multi-factor authentication to protect customers against fraud. 

The long walk to profitability

Flutterwave’s scale has not translated into profits.

The company says it has processed over $50 billion across one billion transactions, but transaction value is not the same as revenue, and revenue is not the same as profit. Payment processors earn a fraction of the value they process, while carrying the costs of technology, customer support, compliance, fraud prevention, local operations, and relationships with financial institutions.

Agboola identified profitability and operational efficiency as priorities in 2025, ahead of a potential public listing. In July 2026, he told The Africa Report that Flutterwave was working towards profitability and would consider going public after achieving that milestone.

Now, the company’s strategy increasingly involves moving closer to the underlying financial infrastructure. In 2022, Flutterwave received a switching and processing licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, allowing it to perform functions in the payments value chain that previously depended on other licenced institutions.

Its January acquisition of open banking startup Mono brought a Nigerian microfinance banking licence into its ecosystem, creating a route to hold deposits and develop banking services within the scope of that licence. 

Controlling more of the transaction lifecycle could reduce dependence on third parties, improve settlement and create new income sources. Agboola told TechCabal in April that the company’s new phase would keep funds on its platform, improving margins.

A banking business gives Flutterwave access to deposits and interest income, while transaction data helps it assess the needs and repayment capacity of small businesses seeking working capital, invoice discounting or trade finance.

Its recent partnerships around stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement point to a similar interest in finding new ways to move value across financial systems that remain difficult to connect. Flutterwave’s mission remains connecting Africa to the world through payments, but the practical meaning of that ambition has widened considerably.

“In 2016, we set out with the mission to solve payment fragmentation across Africa,” Agboola said. “Flutterwave is much larger than a payment gateway now; we are building the continent’s financial infrastructure…. The mission hasn't changed; we are still connecting Africa to the world, but our capacity to drive global commerce has scaled.”