Stablecoins dominate as African startups raise $53 million in May

African startups raised $228 million across 12 deals in May 2026. This shows a drop from $254 million across 36 disclosed deals in May 2025.

A closer look at the deals reveals that Paymentology, the South African-origin card payments processor that raised $175 million in May, accounts for the bulk of that headline figure. The company operates globally and has foreign branches.

Remove it, and May’s actual disclosed total drops to $53 million — the lightest month of the year. What May did have, concentrated within a single week, was a stablecoin cluster that accounted for 70% of all real funding activity that month.

The slowest month, by far

The funding year started fast. February was the busiest month in the tracker by both measures, with 26 deals and $377 million in volume. January followed with 23 deals and $222 million. March had 17 deals and $205 million. April matched February’s deal count at 26. However, she pulled in a much smaller $145 million, reflecting a shift toward smaller rounds and more early-stage activity.

May broke away from all of that, having 12 deals—the lowest count of the year as of now, and half of April’s volume. Without Paymentology, the average disclosed deal size in May was $5.3 million, compared to $6.6 million in April and over $9 million in January.

Read: Africa’s startups have raised over $700 million in Q1 2026. Here’s what the numbers say

The deals that did close in May also skewed toward development finance. Five of the 12 involved DFIs — Village Capital and FMO backed two health and logistics startups in Ghana, Proparco backed Cauridor with $2 million in its ongoing Series A in Côte d’Ivoire, and Triple Jump provided $8 million in debt to MAX. Invest International backed Electric Transits Africa in Kenya. DFI deployments tend to be programmatic, structured, and impact-oriented. They signal commitment to a region but do not reflect the organic private venture activity that the monthly figures are often taken to represent.

Excluding the DFI deals alongside Paymentology, May’s independent venture activity narrows to seven deals raising just under $20 million.

Three stablecoin deals in one week

Between May 20 and May 27, three stablecoin infrastructure companies announced raises totalling $37.4 million.

Sorted Wallet raised $4.4 million in a round led by Tether and Gnosis VC, with participation from Movement, Angel Invest Group, and founders of RWA.io. The round also included $1 million in support from Vox Solutions, a telecoms infrastructure company. Sorted is building a non-custodial stablecoin wallet designed specifically for feature phones and low-end Android devices.

Checkers raised $8 million in a seed round led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, and Framework Ventures, with participation from DFS Lab, Bitso, Airtm, Iyin Aboyeji and Gwera Kiwana. Founded in 2025, the company connects banks, remittance firms, and neobanks to stablecoin liquidity and payment rails through a single API. It supports 75 currencies, covers multiple African markets including Nigeria, Kenya, and Francophone West Africa, and says it processed more than $3 billion in transactions in its first year of operation.

Nala closed the week by announcing a $50 million credit facility from Liquidity, through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and Japan’s MUFG Bank. The initial commitment is $25 million, structured to scale alongside transaction volumes. Founded in Tanzania by Benjamin Fernandes, Nala started as a consumer remittance app and has since rebuilt itself as a B2B stablecoin payments infrastructure, with enterprise demand growing faster than the company could pre-fund. The facility is deliberately non-dilutive. Nala says it still holds more than half the capital from its $40 million equity raise in 2024.

The three companies own different parts of the stablecoin stack. Sorted is the access layer, built for users with basic handsets. Checkers is institutional-grade middleware built for banks or fintechs that want stablecoin rails without having to build them from scratch. Nala is the working capital engine, funding the corridors that connect everything.

Read also: Why Tether buys distribution while PayPal already owns it

The investors who pulled this stunt are not the regular venture capitalists in this clime. Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, does not typically lead seed rounds in African-adjacent startups. Its co-lead position in the Sorted round reads as a deliberate distribution strategy. Al Mada Ventures, which backed Checkers, is the investment vehicle of Morocco’s royal family and the parent group of Attijariwafa Bank, one of the continent’s largest banking institutions. Its participation signals that stablecoin infrastructure is attracting interest from within traditional African finance, not only from global crypto funds.

The rest of May

Outside the stablecoin cluster, May’s remaining deals were spread thin across eight markets.

Cauridor, a remittance infrastructure company focused on Francophone Africa, closed a $2 million Series A led by Proparco with participation from Flourish Ventures and LoftyInc Capital.ARRW, an Egyptian ride-hailing startup, raised $4 million in a seed round from Tasheed Egypt, a domestic fund. The deal is notable for being funded entirely by local capital in a month when international investors were largely absent from the smaller rounds. MIA Healthcare, a South African dental care company, raised $910,000 from Vumela Fund in a growth-stage round. EYST, a Tunisian insurtech, raised an undisclosed seed round from 216 Capital.

May is also the first month in the tracker with no Nigerian deals. Every other month — January through April had at least three Nigerian entries, often more. This is a market that has previously anchored funding activity. It is either a lull in deal-making, a delay in announcements, or a coverage gap.

The stablecoin pattern

May’s stablecoin concentration streams are hot, so let’s point that out. In January, Paycrest ($404,000 pre-seed) and OneDosh ($3 million pre-seed) raised. In April, Kulipa, a stablecoin card-issuing infrastructure company, raised $6.2 million. From January through May, stablecoin infrastructure companies have raised approximately $47 million across six deals, with the pace and scale of individual rounds increasing each month.

This suggests that different companies are building different layers of the same stack — consumer wallets, institutional APIs, card-issuing rails, and working capital facilities, each with investor conviction from both global crypto funds and African institutional players. The stack is not finished, and no single company has yet established itself as the dominant layer. But the capital is arriving in a way that suggests the builders believe the moment is now. Enough investors agree with them to keep the deals coming.

Data sourced from the Condia funding tracker, covering deals announced between January 1 and May 29, 2026.

Last updated: May 30, 2026