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East Asia brings boom to African fintech unicorn Flutterwave

Alexander Onukwue
Alexander Onukwue
Nigeria Reporter
Updated Aug 15, 2025, 6:58am EDT
Africa
Olugbenga Agboola speaks at Semafor’s The Next 3 Billion Summit in Sept. 2024 in New York City.
Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola. Steven Ferdman/Getty Images.
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The News

Africa’s most valuable fintech company Flutterwave reported a boom in transactions in East Asia this year, with nearly $1 billion processed by companies in the region serving customers in Africa.

Flutterwave, founded in Nigeria in 2016, processes online payments for businesses in more than 30 African countries. But growth has also come from outside of Africa. “East-Asia to Africa is one of the corridors where we recently ramped up transactions,” Flutterwave founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola told Semafor. The number of transactions processed along that corridor in the first half of 2024 “was negligible,” he said. The increase this year has come from partnerships with platforms that enable international ecommerce payments, notably two Chinese fintech companies Norafirst and Skyee, Flutterwave said.

The company’s international growth this year has also included securing 20 new licenses in the United States for its remittance app, Send, which enables users to make direct money transfers without any intermediaries.

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Know More

Flutterwave has also rolled out new services in Africa this year, launching its platform in Cameroon, Senegal, and Zambia. In Ghana, where the company launched a new payment feature in March, transaction volumes grew 47 times in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year.

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Step Back

Agboola has said he is focused on growing Flutterwave into an engine that is disciplined in its costs while growing sources of revenue. He told Semafor in April that the company’s goal is to be profitable this year. Building a sustainable business would prepare the company for future possibilities, including a potential initial public offering first floated as an idea in 2022.

Flutterwave’s last round of fundraising was over three-and-a-half years ago when a $250 million investment from Silicon Valley firms, including Tiger Global and Salesforce Ventures, valued the company at over $3 billion. African venture capital fundraising has slowed down markedly in the period since, in line with a global crunch with the passing of the era of zero interest rates.

Even Africa’s largest tech companies have had to be lean and efficient, and “scale with discipline” as Agboola noted in his company’s half-year review.

While that involves optimizing costs and realigning revenues, growth remains necessary for companies with ambitions to dominate African payments, as Flutterwave does. It said the value of processed business payments in the first half of this year grew 20% year-on-year over 2024, and that its monthly profit margin has grown this year.

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Notable

  • Middle class growth in China, India, and other Asian countries is a market opportunity for African fintech leaders to “scale quickly and diversify their revenue streams,” Reuben Mwatosya, vice chair of the Tanzania Fintech Association, wrote.
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