Olugbenga Agboola's Flutterwave takes Circle investment to expand USDC settlement in Africa

Flutterwave, the African payments company founded by Olugbenga Agboola, has taken a strategic investment from Circle Ventures and will begin settling merchant payments in USDC, adding a second dollar stablecoin to its network three weeks after Ripple bought into the business.

The companies announced the deal on Tuesday. Circle Ventures is the corporate venture arm of Circle Internet Group, the New York-listed issuer of USDC. Neither side disclosed how much Circle put in.

The arrangement is straightforward in practice. A merchant using Flutterwave can collect payments in naira, shillings or any other local currency it already accepts, then settle the proceeds in USDC, the dollar-pegged token Circle issues. Settlement clears in minutes and runs around the clock, rather than waiting on banking hours.

The costs are what Flutterwave is aiming at. Cross-border bank transfers out of Africa have historically taken businesses several days and cost upwards of 8 percent in fees, much of that swallowed by the chain of correspondent banks that route money between countries. Flutterwave has kept settlement fees on its stablecoin products below 1 percent.

Agboola cast the investment as an infrastructure play rather than a crypto bet. Stablecoins like USDC have stopped being an experiment and are turning into core financial plumbing, he said, and embedding USDC settlement into rails businesses already use lets money move at internet speed. He said the goal is to make Flutterwave the continent's default stablecoin gateway.

The company has been building toward this for a year. It joined the launch of the Circle Payments Network in 2025, began testing stablecoin payments on the Polygon blockchain with a handful of merchants, and folded wallet infrastructure into its dashboard so businesses could hold and move USDC and Tether's USDT without opening a separate crypto account.

What makes the Circle deal unusual is the company that came before it. On June 16, Ripple took an equity stake in Flutterwave's Series E round, a raise that valued the company at $3.2 billion and pushed its total funding past $500 million. That agreement named Ripple's RLUSD as the primary settlement asset across Flutterwave's high-volume payment corridors, with the XRP Ledger handling transaction clearing and Nigeria as the first market. Ripple's stake size was not disclosed either.

Flutterwave is now carrying tokens issued by direct rivals. USDC had a market capitalisation of roughly $75 billion in mid-2026, against about $1.65 billion for RLUSD and $186.5 billion for Tether's USDT. The company has said it is stablecoin-agnostic and intends to support several digital dollars rather than commit to one, leaving merchants to pick the rail that suits them.

The wider market has moved quickly. Global stablecoin circulation has passed $300 billion. USDC alone reached $75.3 billion in circulation by the end of 2025, up 72 percent in a year, while the total value of USDC transactions climbed 247 percent to $11.9 trillion. Sub-Saharan Africa took in more than $205 billion in on-chain transaction value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent jump, making it one of the fastest-growing stablecoin regions in the world.

Currency volatility explains much of that pull. African businesses have struggled with limited access to dollar accounts and expensive remittance corridors, and dollar-pegged tokens offer a way around both without touching an exchange.

Flutterwave has the distribution to test the idea at scale. Founded in 2016, the company has processed more than a billion transactions worth over $50 billion and operates payment infrastructure in 34 African countries. Its customers include Uber, Air Peace, Bamboo and PiggyVest, and its Send App handles remittances from the diaspora. It competes with Paystack, dLocal, Stripe and Adyen.

Its rivals are chasing the same bet. Onafriq and Yellow Card, two of the largest payments companies on the continent, are also partners in the Circle Payments Network, so the Circle Ventures money buys Flutterwave a closer tie to the issuer rather than any exclusivity over USDC settlement.

Agboola, born in Lagos in 1985, co-founded Flutterwave with Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and became chief executive in 2018 when Aboyeji stepped down. A software engineer by training, he worked at PayPal and Google and held product roles at several Nigerian banks before starting the company. He was awarded Nigeria's Officer of the Order of the Niger in 2022.

The company has been busy on other fronts this year. It acquired Mono, a Nigerian open banking startup, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $25 million, and in April secured a Nigerian banking licence to operate as a microlender.

Some details remain open. The companies gave no rollout timeline across Flutterwave's 34 markets and named no specific licences or jurisdictions, in a region where regulators have taken sharply different views of digital assets. Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission and its central bank have both tightened rules around crypto-linked products in recent years, which means compliance, not technology, may set the pace of the rollout.