A fintech startup born from a conversation on a basketball court at the University of Oxford has officially emerged from stealth mode with $2.7 million in pre-seed funding to tackle one of Africa's most persistent financial infrastructure problems: fragmented foreign exchange liquidity.
Stabyl, a liquidity exchange designed for financial institutions and payment service providers, announced the raise on Thursday, June 26, 2026. The round was led by Konga, the Nigerian e-commerce group.
From Oxford's Basketball Court to African Fintech
The company traces its origins to a 2021β2022 exchange between two MBA students at Oxford. Prince Nnamdi Ekeh, then co-CEO of Konga Group following its merger with his online marketplace Yudala, and Zachary Schwartzman, a former Wall Street analyst who covered the Jumia IPO and developed an interest in African tech, began discussing the potential of stablecoins to solve real payment and foreign exchange challenges across the continent.
That conversation eventually produced Stabyl, co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, a software engineer with more than a decade of experience building financial infrastructure.
The Problem Stabyl Is Solving
Stabyl is not a consumer payments app or a cross-border remittance platform. Its focus sits at an earlier, less visible point in the transaction chain: the moment when financial institutions must source foreign exchange before any payment can be executed.
Ekeh illustrated the challenge using Konga itself as an example. When the e-commerce company needs foreign exchange, its treasury team must contact multiple banks, payment service providers, and liquidity providers simultaneously to compare rates and secure supply. By the time responses arrive and approvals clear, market prices have often already moved β forcing the process to restart or accept a less favourable rate.
How the Platform Works
Stabyl replaces those fragmented, manual negotiations with a central limit order book (CLOB) β a system in which buyers and sellers of foreign exchange can automatically post and match orders in real time, without the back-and-forth of phone calls and bilateral approvals.
"Everybody on Stabyl can create a transaction, and that transaction gets matched and queued immediately. That entire process of having to make calls, hold transactions, figure out rates and do all this β that goes away," said Michael Anyi in an interview with TechCabal on Friday, June 27, 2026.
The result, according to the founders, is near-instantaneous settlement and a single platform that consolidates liquidity from across multiple institutional participants. Schwartzman described the broader ambition in direct terms.
"Our goal is to connect these participants on one platform, creating the deepest and most accessible liquidity pool on the continent," Schwartzman said.
Konga as Both Backer and Use Case
The decision by Konga to lead Stabyl's pre-seed round is notable, given that Ekeh's co-CEO role at the e-commerce group provided the direct operational experience that shaped the startup's thesis. Konga functions simultaneously as an investor and as a real-world proof of the problem Stabyl aims to solve.
The $2.7 million raise positions Stabyl to build out its infrastructure and onboard financial institutions across Nigeria and the wider African market. For more on how African startups are building critical financial infrastructure, follow TechTrendi's ongoing coverage.
The FX infrastructure segment has attracted increasing attention from investors as Africa's digital payment volumes grow. Stabyl's CLOB-based approach draws from models common in global capital markets but applies them specifically to the institutional FX pain points that have long slowed settlement across African economies.