Nigeria's Daya raises a US$2.4m pre-seed to build stablecoin cross-border payment rails for African businesses

Summary

Lagos-based Daya closed a US$2.4m pre-seed on 24 June 2026 led by Hivemind Capital, with Lattice, Alliance, Globelink and the Aptos Foundation participating. Co-founded by Aleph Lasebikan and Paul Joe, alumni of stablecoin issuer Circle and early African exchange Helicarrier, Daya offers African businesses virtual US-dollar accounts, instant cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement into local currencies, starting with the Nigerian naira. Earlier in June, Dubai-based exchange HashKey MENA named Daya its African payments partner for an Aptos-built UAE-to-Africa stablecoin corridor, positioning the startup in enterprise stablecoin rails rather than consumer crypto.

The split

Crypto-industry outlets frame Daya as part of the enterprise stablecoin-rails wave, dollar settlement abstracted behind a business bank account. Nigerian tech press centres the practical problem: dollar scarcity and slow, costly cross-border transfers that stablecoins can route around. The two readings agree on the mechanism but differ on the subject, a crypto story to one, a trade-finance fix to the other.

By the numbers

• US$2.4m, pre-seed round.
• Hivemind Capital, lead, with the Aptos Foundation.
• Naira, the first local settlement currency.
• Circle and Helicarrier, the founders' prior firms.
• June 24, 2026, announced.

Why it matters

Stablecoins are becoming Africa's cross-border settlement layer where dollars are scarce and correspondent banking is slow, and a UAE-to-Africa corridor built on Aptos shows Gulf exchanges wiring into the continent. Daya is small, but it sits at the practical edge where crypto stops being speculation and becomes payments infrastructure.

What to watch

• Whether the HashKey MENA UAE-to-Africa corridor goes live at scale.
• Nigerian and regional regulatory treatment of stablecoin settlement.
• Expansion beyond the naira into other African currencies.