Daya has quickly become one of the more closely watched early stage fintechs in Nigeria, built around a frustration its founders have lived firsthand for over a decade. Founded in October 2025 by Aleph Lasebikan and Paul Joe, Daya helps businesses receive dollar payments, settle transactions using stablecoins, and move funds across borders through a combination of regulated banking partners and blockchain based settlement infrastructure. That mission just attracted serious institutional backing, with the company announcing a 2.4 million dollar oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Hivemind Capital, a New York based digital asset investment firm, with participation from Lattice Fund, Alliance DAO, Globelink Investment, and the Aptos Foundation.

The problem Daya is chasing is a real and expensive one. Sending money across African borders is still painfully expensive, with fees running between 5% and 10% per transaction, settlement taking days, and businesses often having zero visibility into where their money actually is. Daya's answer describes itself as a business-focused stablecoin neobank, a single platform where African companies can hold virtual US dollar accounts, send and receive instant cross-border payments, pay with cards and settle in stablecoins while managing treasury across currencies, all built around an onramp and routing engine, a flagship business app, and developer APIs.

The founding team's background lends the venture unusual weight for such an early stage company. Lasebikan and Joe previously built Helicarrier, one of Africa's earliest crypto exchange and stablecoin remittance platforms, and bring additional experience from stints at Circle, Microsoft, and Lyrik Ventures. Writing about his own journey into the problem, Lasebikan recalled using Bitcoin early on to send money back home to family in Lagos, Nigeria, describing it as a much better experience than Western Union, but a painful and convoluted process built for developers and nerds, not for my parents. He has framed Daya as the culmination of a decade of experience trying to tackle this problem, stretching from Microsoft to Helicarrier to Circle.

The traction backing up that vision has been swift. The round comes just seven months after Daya emerged from the Alliance DAO ALL15 cohort, having previously raised 350,000 dollars in seed capital from Alliance DAO in 2025, and the startup has posted over 40% month-on-month growth in 2026 since then, a curve that industry observers note tends to attract Series A attention quickly. Daya plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering team, secure key regulatory licenses, and pilot with early enterprise customers in high-volume corridors such as Nigeria–China, Kenya–India, and intra-African trade routes.

Real risks remain part of the story too. Regulatory frameworks for stablecoins across Africa remain uneven, and Nigeria, Daya's home base, has oscillated between crypto skepticism and cautious engagement, meaning any regulatory tightening could complicate operations. Even so, with Circle's IPO success feeding growing institutional comfort with stablecoins, and African enterprises increasingly digitizing treasury operations, Daya's founders are betting that owning the entire cross border payment workflow, not just the rails underneath it, positions the company to capture a meaningful share of Africa's next wave of digital finance infrastructure.