Paystack

Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi founded Paystack in Lagos in 2015 and went through Y Combinator the year after. The problem was concrete: Nigerian online shops could barely accept cards, and the options that existed had poor approval rates and painful integrations. Paystack offered a developer-friendly API for local cards, bank transfers and USSD, the text-based mobile menu that works even on phones with no internet connection.

In October 2020 Stripe bought the company for a reported sum north of 200 million dollars, at the time its largest acquisition. The deal was widely read as proof that African fintech was the real thing. Paystack still runs under its own name and has expanded into Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.