Investing in Daya

Today we are excited to announce our investment in Daya, a crypto-native B2B payments platform building the financial infrastructure layer for African businesses.

If you run a business in Nigeria and need to pay a supplier in the United States, the process is genuinely broken. You start by converting Naira to dollars through a Bureau de Change — a process that takes one to two days, requires hunting multiple brokers for rates, and doesn't happen on weekends. Then you wait another one to two days for those dollars to settle into your Nigerian bank account. Then you initiate a wire transfer that takes four to five more days. Total cost: 5-10% in fees. Total time: anywhere from four business days to two weeks. Emirates Airlines left the Nigerian market in 2023 specifically because of this problem.

Daya fixes this. Businesses deposit local currency — Naira, Kenyan Shillings, South African Rand — and Daya handles everything else. Under the hood, the company uses stablecoin infrastructure and a proprietary smart routing engine that aggregates P2P liquidity, OTC desks, and decentralized exchanges to move funds internationally in a fraction of the time and cost. For the end user, it looks like a business bank account. No crypto knowledge required.

The market is enormous. Nigeria alone receives $22.5B in annual stablecoin receipts — nearly double South Africa — and has a population of 235 million people. It has already produced fintechs like Flutterwave, last valued at $3B. Across the continent, cross-border payment flows represent a multitrillion-dollar opportunity that remains deeply underserved. Verto, the incumbent most comparable to Daya, processes $15B in annual FX volume relying entirely on traditional banking rails. dLocal, listed on the Nasdaq at a $3B market cap, paid $150M to acquire a Kenyan cross-border company last year — a strong signal that sophisticated capital recognizes the African payments opportunity. Daya's stablecoin-native approach gives them a structural speed and cost advantage that traditional fintechs cannot easily replicate.

The obvious question in this space is whether large, well-capitalized fintechs will simply add stablecoin functionality and squeeze out crypto-native players. Our view is that they won't move fast enough. Nigerian neobanks today cannot offer USD or stablecoin services to their SME customers — they lack the regulatory infrastructure, the liquidity networks, and the product intuition. These are hard things to acquire. Daya's liquidity moat comes from years of deep relationships with P2P players across the continent — relationships that can't be replicated through an API integration.

The team is exceptional. Aleph co-founded Helicarrier, widely regarded as one of the strongest founding teams in African crypto, where the company processed over $1B in volume and went through YC. PJ spent time at Messari, built Stable Stats into a go-to stablecoin data resource, and brings deep relationships across the African enterprise and regulatory ecosystem. The team has relocated to Lagos and set up a physical office to build the trust and personal relationships that large Nigerian businesses require.

We're excited to back Aleph, PJ, and the team as they build the financial infrastructure layer that African businesses deserve.