Company profile

Knabu is a fintech infrastructure company providing correspondent banking and payment settlement solutions that enable banks and financial institutions to access global payment, clearing, and settlement networks. Through its API-enabled platform, Knabu delivers multi-currency accounts, foreign exchange, liquidity, and transaction management services, helping financial institutions, particularly in underserved and emerging markets, facilitate fast, efficient, and compliant cross-border transactions.

Why we invested

There is a verdict passed on entire economies, and no one is ever in the room to hear it. In a compliance department in London or New York, a global bank decides a whole market is not worth the trouble and quietly withdraws the relationships that let banks there reach the rest of the world. A fintech in Lagos or a bank in Accra suddenly cannot settle a payment abroad or move money across a border without routing it through the dollar, halfway around the world and back. These are not failing institutions. They have customers, revenue, licences. Their only crime is their postcode.

Measuring the true creditworthiness of a Ghanaian FinTech is harder than walking away, so the incumbents assume the worst and leave. Knabu's answer is to price the real risk instead of the assumed one, and the way it does this is what won us over. Blockchain built into the foundations gives every transaction a verifiable, tamper-proof record, folding compliance directly into the rails. It turns the very checks that scare incumbents away into something cheaper and more trustworthy, and on that footing Knabu can become the institution these markets were denied. What we also liked was that Knabu set out on this path before USDT and USDC came to dominate the space, building blockchain settlement infrastructure before the tools everyone now reaches for even existed. A clearing bank for the banks and fintechs of emerging markets, holding their accounts and settling their value without bending every transaction through a financial centre an ocean away.

A bet this difficult is heavily reliant on the quality of the founder. Gabrielle has such a rare command of the compliance and settlement architecture where ventures like this usually die. A clearing bank is less an engineering problem than a regulatory marathon, and we believe she is one of the few people capable of running this.

We backed Knabu so that financial institutions across emerging markets can finally settle foreign payments. For that freedom it passes on to the trader paying a supplier across the border, the family receiving money from abroad without losing a tenth of it to the journey. Knabu is building a bank for fintechs, but the people who feel it are the millions those fintechs serve, an entire layer of the economy.