Morocco's Al Mada Ventures leads $8 million Checker round to scale stablecoin infrastructure across Africa

Morocco's Al Mada Ventures is putting institutional weight behind stablecoin rails for African finance. The sovereign wealth-backed fund, parent of Attijariwafa Bank, has led an $8 million round in Checker, the global digital-asset network building infrastructure for emerging-market financial institutions, alongside Galaxy Ventures and Framework Ventures. Strategic backing came from DFS Lab in Africa, Bitso and Airtm in Latin America, and Onigiri Capital, SNZ Capital and Velocity in Asia.

The African cap table runs deeper than the lead. Flutterwave co-founder Iyin Aboyeji, former Onafriq vice president Gwera Kiwana and Juicyway co-founder Justin Ziegler joined the round alongside individual angels from Stripe and Tala, lending the deal an unusually deep African signal for a Hong Kong and U.S.-rooted founding team.

Al Mada framed the bet as a thematic call. "We identified that the primary barrier to scalability for the stablecoin industry is access to liquidity at scale, specifically the friction in fiat on-ramps and off-ramps," managing director Omar Laalej said. "Checker addresses this with a novel orchestration layer that organizes fragmented stablecoin liquidity into a programmable, compliant network."

The Moroccan fund brings more than capital. Al Mada controls Wafa Cash, the remittance network that runs across Africa and into the diaspora, and Attijariwafa is one of Africa's largest banking groups. A vote of confidence from that base lands as institutional validation for stablecoin-powered infrastructure on the continent.

The problem Checker is trying to solve is fragmentation. African stablecoin operators often stitch together liquidity from hundreds of WhatsApp groups and dozens of providers, with cross-border payments hostage to correspondent banking costs and foreign-exchange volatility. Checker's single API connects banks and neobanks to global stablecoin liquidity, treasury, payments and credit in one rail.

The platform already has scale. Checker says it has crossed $3 billion in total processing volume, roughly 1% of annual global business-to-business stablecoin payments, and covers 75 currencies. Clients include Rail, which Ripple acquired earlier this year, Braza Bank in Brazil and Belo in Argentina. Its African footprint already spans Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Francophone West Africa.

The new capital will deepen that coverage. Chief executive Jack Chong said the team will push harder on replacing correspondent banking links, build embedded borrowing and lending products and roll out AI agents for treasury, back-office and analytics work. Co-founder Justin McMahan rounds out a small but heavy-weight team that has spent years inside the plumbing of 24/7 global finance.