Stabyl closed a pre-seed to build same-day naira settlement for Nigerian merchants, and the product is already live through KongaPay, the payments arm of Konga's marketplace. The pitch is deliberately narrow. A sale can clear on a merchant's dashboard the same afternoon and still leave the seller waiting several business days, sometimes closer to a week around bank holidays, before the cash hits a bank account. For small sellers restocking inventory, that gap is working capital they don't have. Stabyl sits between the marketplace processor and the merchant's bank and advances the payout on the calendar day the sale closes. I keep coming back to how unglamorous that sentence is. No new acceptance rail. No consumer app. Just getting money that already belongs to the merchant into the account faster.
Two classmates, then an engineer who'd bled on bank APIs
The company started as a complaint loop between Oxford MBA classmates Chidi Ekeh and Daniel Schwartzman. Nigerian merchant friends kept describing the same pattern: dashboard green, bank account empty. Ekeh grew up around family retail in Lagos and had watched that squeeze up close. Schwartzman had worked in payments infrastructure before school and treated the delay as plumbing, not fate.
They spent a term sketching the pieces a faster settlement layer would need, netting across a batch of merchants, a liquidity buffer covering the gap between marketplace release and merchant payout, reconciliation against each bank's windows. At that point it was still a side project with a spreadsheet that hadn't met a webhook. The kind of deck that looks clean until someone asks what happens when a bank statement arrives two days late with three missing references.
Adaeze Anyi joined as the third co-founder after they brought her the concept. She'd spent years building reconciliation systems inside a Lagos payments processor, which is a polite way of saying she'd already lost nights to inconsistent bank APIs and edge cases that only appear when real money moves. Stabyl lists all three as co-founders, which is fair. The hallway insight was Ekeh and Schwartzman's. Working software waited on Anyi.
I've heard a lot of "we felt the pain" founding stories that never include the person who actually closed the books at 2 a.m. Stabyl's version at least names her. If the product works, it will be because the reconciliation layer is boring and correct, not because the Oxford origin story photographs well.
KongaPay is an accelerator, not a replacement processor
Stabyl plugs into KongaPay's existing payout pipeline. When a Konga sale settles, KongaPay normally batches merchant payouts on a multi-day cycle. Stabyl advances the merchant from its own liquidity pool the same day, then reconciles once KongaPay's settlement lands, float for a fee on the advanced amount. That is short-term credit and reconciliation risk, not a prettier status page. A meaningful share of the pre-seed is earmarked for the liquidity buffer that makes same-day advances possible at real volume, not just for hiring engineers to polish dashboards.
Nigeria's interbank rails have gotten much faster over the past decade through NIBSS instant payments. Marketplace payout cycles lagged anyway, mostly because processors batch for operational simplicity and risk management. The banking layer can clear. The business process chooses not to. Stabyl is betting a layer that only does marketplace-to-merchant advances can outrun a general-purpose batch cycle.
Naira liquidity has also been more volatile amid exchange-rate reforms over the past two years, which makes float-fronting riskier than the same model in a calmer currency. That risk is one reason Stabyl started with a single partner instead of spraying integrations across every marketplace in Lagos at once. Advancing payouts means eating timing risk when FX swings and bank windows slip. A thin buffer looks fine in a pitch until holiday settlement clusters hit all at once.
Merchants experience this as a calendar change, not a new brand. The sale still happens on Konga. The payout just shows up sooner. Stabyl's job is to stay invisible when reconciliation works and painfully visible in the ledger when it doesn't, which is the opposite of how a lot of fintech demos prefer to behave.
Live for a cohort, talking to one more marketplace
Stabyl says KongaPay is live for an initial merchant cohort, with a wider Konga rollout planned once volume and reconciliation accuracy hold up. They're also in talks with at least one other Nigerian marketplace. Nothing beyond KongaPay is public.
Cohort size matters more than the press line. A small set of sellers is enough to learn whether same-day advances match KongaPay's eventual settlement without a mess of manual fixes. It is not enough to prove the liquidity pool survives Black Friday-shaped volume. The founders know that. The next raise conversation will be about whether the pilot's error rate stayed boring when the buffer got real use.
The founders say the pre-seed buys enough runway to validate at real volume before the next raise. Same-day payment sells itself to merchants. Whether the liquidity and reconciliation engine survives past pilot size is the part that decides if this company is infrastructure or a demo with a press release.
I'm withholding the usual "Africa fintech is hot" framing. Settlement delay is a specific, measurable irritation. Either Stabyl shortens it on Konga at a fee merchants will keep paying, or it doesn't. The second marketplace conversation only matters after the first integration stops needing heroics.
Settlement speed, not another acceptance API
Accepting a card or transfer in Nigeria got much easier through processors like Paystack and Flutterwave. Getting the cash into a merchant account quickly did not keep up, partly because speed at that layer means carrying balance-sheet risk a pure payments API was never built to hold. Stabyl is trying to live in that gap. It's a harder business than shipping endpoints, capital and underwriting, not just code.
Whether this pre-seed is enough to prove the model, or whether KongaPay volume forces a much larger raise, is a next-round problem. The three founders are betting early and narrow beats broad and slow. A West Africa-wide settlement layer on day one would need more capital and more regulatory groundwork than one deep integration. A better-funded competitor could still blanket more marketplaces while Stabyl is still proving reconciliation on Konga. That race doesn't show up cleanly in a pre-seed announcement.
For now the company is a KongaPay-shaped bet with a liquidity pool and three people who argue about bank files. That's narrower than the category label "African fintech infrastructure" suggests, and probably healthier for a pre-seed. If same-day naira payout becomes table stakes on Nigerian marketplaces, Stabyl either becomes part of that plumbing or gets run over by someone with a bigger balance sheet. The live cohort is the only evidence that counts until then.
I'll be looking for one unglamorous metric as the wider Konga rollout happens: how often Stabyl's same-day advance and KongaPay's eventual settlement disagree enough to need a human. Marketing will talk about hours saved. The ledger will talk about exceptions. Exceptions decide whether the fee is a product or a cleanup job.
- Funding
