Company profile

Mansa powers cross-border payments, replacing the capital-intensive prefunding model with programmable, on-demand liquidity. Through its DeFi-powered platform, payment operators can seamlessly access settlement, collections, payouts, FX, and treasury services via a single API, significantly improving capital efficiency and transaction speed. At the core of its offering are stablecoin-backed liquidity pools that enable instant settlement and global payouts for emerging markets without the need to lock capital across multiple jurisdictions.

Why we invested

When we first met Mouloukou, he told us how, as a student in Hong Kong, he watched his parents try to send money across borders to support him, and the experience was, in his words, brutal. Most people file that frustration away. Mouloukou spent the next decade of his career, in web3 and across African fintech, building towards the answer.

Every company that moves money across borders carries a hidden tax, and most people never see it. A remittance firm, a payment platform, a mobile money operator settling in real time all have to keep capital sitting idle in every market they touch, pre-funded, waiting, just in case a transaction needs it. Money that could be growing the business instead lies frozen in a dozen jurisdictions, and the faster the company grows, the more it has to lock away. Banks cannot fix this, because the daily, sometimes hourly, rhythm of these flows moves far quicker than a monthly loan or a wire that clears in days. Mansa's answer is to replace that dead, pre-funded capital with on-demand stablecoin liquidity that arrives at the exact moment of settlement.

The opportunity in that is what excited us. Cross-border payments in Africa are heading towards a trillion dollars a year, and a sliver of that volume sits frozen across the system at any given moment, a vast pool of idle capital with no one to put it to work intelligently. We backed Mansa because they are building the layer that does make use of that capital.

What anchored our conviction is that this is the right bet, in the right market, made by the right people. Mouloukou precisely understands the problem and Nkiru is the super glue binding the solution into a deliverable package. She led blockchain strategy inside SWIFT and at Dell, where she built exactly this kind of infrastructure from within the institutions that run global money, bringing the operational rigour that turns a bold thesis into a company that actually settles billions safely. We hold a clear view that decentralised finance and asset tokenisation are not passing trends but frontier technologies that will keep reshaping global liquidity, and that this is a team that will capture some of that value in emerging markets.