IN SHORT: Tanzanian-founded fintech Nala has secured up to $50 million in credit financing from Liquidity, arranged through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and Japan’s MUFG Bank. The facility begins with an initial $25 million tranche and can scale to $50 million or more based on transaction volumes. The capital will fund Nala’s stablecoin-powered cross-border payment infrastructure, pre-funding business-to-business corridors connecting Africa, Europe and the United States. Stablecoin B2B payment volumes have grown sixfold in eighteen months to more than $30 billion monthly globally.
Nala, the Tanzania-born fintech that has evolved from a diaspora remittance app into one of Africa’s most sophisticated cross-border payment infrastructure companies, has secured a $50 million credit facility that will allow it to pre-fund the stablecoin payment corridors that enterprises need for high-velocity B2B transfers between Africa, Europe and the United States. The facility, announced on May 28, is structured as debt rather than equity, preserving Nala’s cap table at a moment when the company still holds more than 50% of its 2024 $40 million Series A round.
- The facility is provided by Liquidity, a private credit firm that uses AI to assess credit risk, through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture with MUFG Bank, Japan’s largest lender. The initial drawdown is $25 million, with a scaling mechanism that allows the facility to expand to $50 million or more as Nala’s transaction volumes grow. The structure ties capital deployment directly to operational demand rather than requiring Nala to draw down a fixed lump sum.
- Nala processes business-to-business payments across 249 banks and 26 mobile money services in 16 countries. Its Rafiki enterprise infrastructure platform handles collections and payouts for corporates moving money between African markets and international counterparties. The stablecoin layer sits beneath these transactions, providing the settlement rail that makes real-time cross-border payments economically viable without the correspondent banking fees that traditional SWIFT transfers impose.
- The immediate use of the facility is pre-funding: Nala must deposit funds in destination corridors before it can execute instant transfers. As transaction volumes grow, the working capital requirement scales proportionally. The $50 million facility gives Nala the operational firepower to onboard larger enterprise clients and handle higher-frequency transaction flows without raising additional equity at potentially dilutive valuations.
- Benjamin Fernandes, Nala’s founder and CEO, said the facility validates the company’s vision of building the definitive stablecoin payments infrastructure long-term, and described Liquidity’s structuring as highly flexible, noting the capital was essential for NALA to pre-fund single-direction payments after a period of growth that exceeded the company’s pre-funding capacity.
- The broader stablecoin payments market context is significant. Monthly B2B stablecoin volumes surpassed $30 billion globally by early 2026, a sixfold increase in eighteen months, according to data from Artemis Analytics and McKinsey cited by payment firms. African corridors represent a disproportionate share of this growth: the continent’s fragmented banking infrastructure, high remittance costs and large diaspora population create structural demand for stablecoin-based settlement that legacy banking cannot serve at comparable cost.
Nala’s debt-over-equity financing decision is itself a signal. The company could have raised a Series B equity round but chose structured credit instead, preserving its cap table and avoiding the valuation negotiation that would have been required in the current funding environment. African fintechs at Nala’s stage, with proven revenue, growing transaction volumes and a defensible infrastructure position, are increasingly using debt as a growth instrument rather than equity. This mirrors the trajectory of global payments infrastructure companies like Stripe and Adyen, which used balance sheet strength to fund operational scaling rather than returning to venture markets at every growth inflection.
The Bigger Picture: Stablecoin payments are not the future of African finance. They are already the present. NALA’s facility reflects a B2B payment market that has already moved to stablecoin rails for a substantial portion of cross-border corporate transactions. The $30 billion monthly global volume number is not a forecast: it is a current reading. Africa’s position in that market is growing because correspondent banking in African corridors is expensive, slow and unreliable by the standards that enterprise clients now expect. NALA’s infrastructure addresses that gap. The $50 million facility gives it the scale to move from mid-market enterprise to large-enterprise client onboarding, which is where the high-volume corridors and the structurally significant revenue are.
Source: TechCabal, May 28 2026 / Launch Base Africa, May 28 2026
