His $5,000 was frozen by PayPal. Now he’s raised nearly $6million to expand stablecoin cross-border payments for Africans

Five years ago, a young software engineer in Nairobi received a $5,000 payment for freelance work. The project was done, the client was satisfied, but PayPal wasn’t.

Without warning, the global payments giant froze his funds for three months, declaring his country a high-risk jurisdiction, a digital verdict on where he was born.

For 19-year-old Nandwa, figuring out his place in the world, the shock of it all became a moment of clarity.

“It was a wake-up call,” he says. “Here I was, a developer building global systems, and I couldn’t access my own money. I realised Africans weren’t just excluded from opportunities, we were excluded from access. And I had the skills to do something about it.”

That frustration became the spark for Honeycoin, the fintech startup he would found months later, in the stillness of the pandemic lockdown, in 2020.

Today, Nandwa is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of Honeycoin, a rapidly growing fintech platform connecting traditional finance with blockchain infrastructure.

The company now processes more than $150 million in monthly transactions across 40 markets, transforming how Africans send, receive, and interact with money.

Before he ever thought of building a fintech, Nandwa was a coder. He was drawn to computers the way some kids are drawn to football fields.

His father, an engineer, had encouraged his curiosity. “I loved gaming,” Nandwa says, “and my dad told me, if you learn how to code, you can build your own games.”

That idea, that one could create entire worlds from a keyboard, changed everything.

By age nine, he was teaching himself to code; by 12, he was contributing to online developer forums; by his teens, he was fluent in Ruby, C, Python, and JavaScript.

But for him, being a young African coder in the early 2010s wasn’t glamorous. There were few local communities, and few mentors. “Software engineering wasn’t cool then,” he laughs. “There were no meetups. I learned online, helping people on FreeCodeCamp and Codecademy.”

That self-taught discipline laid the foundation for everything that came next.

Before founding Honeycoin, Nandwa built and exited two startups, including an e-commerce platform in Dar es Salaam that scaled to nearly $1 million in annual revenue before being acquired by Zapata.

But the turning point in his career came with his move to Flutterwave, the African payments unicorn that shaped his understanding of financial infrastructure at scale.

There, he spent nearly two years as a software engineer, helping develop integrations and building payment rails across the continent. “Flutterwave was my classroom,” he says. “I saw how hard it is to scale financial infrastructure in Africa, how much you depend on third-party systems that can fail at any time.”

That frustration revealed a deeper problem: treasury and liquidity systems in emerging markets are dependent on fragmented, unreliable rails. The solution, he believed, would require infrastructure built differently, on blockchain rails designed for speed, resilience and global reach.

Honeycoin, he says, is the operating system for money in emerging markets, a unified platform that allows businesses to issue stablecoin wallets, access banking infrastructure, send cards, and plug into global blockchain payment rails through simple APIs.

“It’s about giving businesses and people financial control,” Nandwa says, not just a connection into systems that can fail, but a new system altogether.

Honeycoin began with a simple idea: make it as easy to send money between Nairobi and Lagos as it is between New York and San Francisco.

The first product was a consumer app that let users hold and send stablecoins, digital currencies like USDT and USDC that are pegged to the U.S. dollar, across markets. Nigerians could send money to Kenya, Ghanaians to the U.S., all without touching traditional banks or SWIFT transfers.

“We learned quickly that people didn’t just want crypto,” he says. “They wanted open, fast, borderless money.”

Within months, thousands of users were transacting on the platform. But as adoption grew, so did opportunity. Businesses began asking for the same technology — APIs, stablecoin infrastructure, and blockchain rails.

That led to the company’s evolution from a consumer app to a B2B infrastructure provider.

Now, Honeycoin powers wallets, cards, and payments for startups and enterprises, giving them access to both traditional and decentralised finance rails.

“Africa’s financial systems have been built on imported infrastructure, SWIFT, Visa, PayPal, often inaccessible or unreliable. Honeycoin’s model flips that. By merging stablecoins, blockchain, and traditional rails, we offer a resilient alternative that works whether banks are online or not,” Nandwa said.

According to him, the company processes more than $150 million every month, nearly $2 billion in annualised volume, and isn’t slowing down.

Honeycoin made headlines after announcing a strategic partnership with Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer. But the deal, Nandwa says, started over coffee.

“I met George Musomi, Tether’s Africa lead, for coffee. He’d heard about us and decided to try the platform. He did one transaction, then another. A few weeks later, he said Tether was looking to expand in Africa, and thought we should be part of that.”

What followed was a multi-million-dollar partnership that included a six-figure non-dilutive grant and a liquidity program to deepen payment access across the continent.

Honeycoin also partners with Binance, Stellar, and several African fintechs, including GG, TapaSend, and Nala, which use its infrastructure to move funds seamlessly across borders.

The startup’s growth has been swift. The company now serves over 800 enterprise clients and more than 200,000 consumers across the continent.

“Right now, we process about $150 million monthly, and our goal is to hit $1 billion a month within six months. With Tether and other partners like Binance and Stellar, we think that’s achievable,” Nandwa said.

Partnerships will be key to that vision. “I’d love to work with SWIFT, yes, even though our work challenges their model,” he says. “We’ve already partnered with Stripe, and by extension Paystack, and are engaging with the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS).

For Nandwa, Africa’s biggest advantage isn’t just its youth or digital growth, it’s the regulatory “grey area.”

“Many markets on the continent are not illegal for stablecoins,” he explains. “They’re not banned, not regulated, which basically means you can innovate.”

That legal ambiguity has opened a quiet frontier. “There’s more trade happening on stablecoins in Francophone Africa than in fiat,” he says, pausing. “And I can’t say that by way of facts, but by way of understanding, just from the sheer volume we’ve seen.”

Honeycoin has built its growth on that flexibility, staying close to regulators where needed while moving fast in countries where the rules are still catching up.

“We’ve seen major milestone wins like the Virtual Asset Service Provider Bill in Kenya,” he adds.

Not every market is open, of course. “We would never do anything crypto-related in Egypt because it’s fully illegal,” Nandwa says. “But across Africa, there are blue-ocean markets where we’ve had a lot of success because we were early and moved quickly.”

Honeycoin is licensed across key global markets. It holds MSB and Payment Service Solutions Provider (PSSP) licences in Canada, a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) licence in Europe, and MSB approval in the U.S.

On the African continent, it has secured Letters of No Objection (LNOs) from regulators in Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania and established partnerships with mobile network operators and local payment service providers.

Honeycoin has raised close to $6 million to date, with $4.5 million secured this year, an impressive feat amid Africa’s tight venture climate.

The latest equity round was led by Flourish Ventures, with participation from TLcom Capital, Stellar Development Foundation, Lava, Musha Ventures, 4DX Ventures, Antler, and Visa Ventures, the investment arm of the global payments leader.

Asked whether fundraising came with its own hurdles, Nandwa said there were multiple layers to the challenge.

“First, we had to convince investors that Africa shows the largest opportunity for financial expansion and cross-border adoption,not just now but for the next decade.”

Currency volatility was another hurdle. “The naira can fluctuate by 20–30% in a year, the Kenyan shilling by 2–3%,” he says. “Those are wide swings for something that should be stable. We had to show the infrastructure we’d built to manage liquidity and risk.”

But perhaps the hardest part was perception. “We don’t have many repeatable success stories,” Nandwa says. “We have Dangote, yes. We have Paystack, and Shola Akinlade, Paystack’s former CEO, is actually an investor in Honeycoin, but we need more examples of African startups that scale globally.”

A decade from now, Nandwa wants borders to be an invisible concept in finance. What started as one founder’s fight against a broken system is quickly becoming the rails for a new economic reality, one where Africans, and the next billion users worldwide, transact freely without limits.