Tolu Alabi

Tolu Alabi co-founded Cleva in 2023 to give Nigerians and other Africans something that had long been out of reach: a real USD bank account, held in the United States, accessible from home. A Nigerian who moved to the US on a college scholarship and went on to earn an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Alabi built her financial product credentials across Goldman Sachs, WhatsApp, Amazon, and Stripe — where she led the Credit Card Issuing product and the Identity and Access Management team. That decade of experience building payment infrastructure at scale is what she brought to Cleva. The company was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 cohort and raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding led by 1984 Ventures, with backing from FirstCheck Africa and The Raba Partnership.

Alabi's significance lies not just in what Cleva does, but in why someone with her résumé came home to build it. She could have stayed in Silicon Valley. Instead, she identified the single biggest financial obstacle facing Africa's professional class — the inability to receive international payments in stable currency — and applied enterprise-grade thinking to solve it. Cleva has since secured an IMTO licence from the Central Bank of Nigeria, cementing its regulatory standing as the infrastructure of choice for Africans who earn globally but live locally.