Flutterwave, Africa’s leading payments infrastructure company, yesterday announced a strategic investment from Ripple, the leading provider of blockchain-based enterprise solutions for traditional and digital finance.
This partnership marks the definitive next phase of Flutterwave’s long-term stablecoin strategy, seamlessly connecting its existing cross-border settlement capabilities with enterprise-grade digital liquidity.
By anchoring this infrastructure in the heart of the continent, Flutterwave is empowering African businesses to bypass legacy frictions, ultimately bolstering Nigeria’s role as the primary hub for global digital asset trade and driving sustained economic resilience across the African continent.
The investment is a part of Flutterwave’s Series E fundraising, which values the company at $3.2 billion, reflecting deep institutional alignment with the company’s strong financial fundamentals and long-term value proposition.
This integration is the realisation of a clear, multi-year roadmap that has already seen Flutterwave systematically integrate stablecoin-powered settlement, liquidity, and remittance rails. By embedding RLUSD into its core ecosystem, the company is finalising a ‘stablecoin-first’ payment architecture that eliminates traditional bottlenecks. This unified approach delivers a consistent, scalable, and compliant liquidity stack that transforms how African enterprises interact with global markets, effectively cementing a new way for digital money acceptance that is both borderless and locally grounded.
The strategic investment and partnership centres on a robust product integration designed to accelerate the adoption of digital asset infrastructure, bringing unprecedented speed, liquidity, and cost-efficiency to cross-border commerce throughout Africa.
The partnership is built on three core pillars: embedding RLUSD into Flutterwave’s payment rails and Send App remittance corridors as a primary settlement asset for high-volume channels; leveraging the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for faster transaction clearing; and deploying a unified API to seamlessly bridge Flutterwave’s domestic network with Ripple Payments, Ripple’s global payments network.
By merging traditional fiat payment methods, including local cards, mobile wallets, and bank transfers, with Ripple’s enterprise blockchain technology, the partnership eliminates the historical friction points of African cross-border payments, such as multi-day delays and inflated FX margins. Instead, businesses will experience guaranteed liquidity, predictable pricing, and real-time settlement.
“Flutterwave has built one of the most advanced payments networks in Africa, and as its infrastructure evolves, stablecoins are becoming central to that story,” said Reece Merrick, Managing Director, MEA at Ripple. “Our investment will establish RLUSD within that infrastructure, with Flutterwave driving stablecoin flows over the XRPL and deepening its role as a settlement layer for real-world payments across the continent. Together we also plan to bring Ripple Payments’ speed and efficiency to cross-border transactions in the region, opening up faster, lower-cost financial services to businesses and consumers at scale.”
Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Founder and CEO of Flutterwave, added, “This investment marks a pivotal moment in our journey, enabling us to significantly scale our infrastructure and expand our stablecoin-enabled payments roadmap. By unlocking faster settlement and lower-cost cross-border payments, we are building a payment superhighway that connects African commerce directly to the global economy. This partnership is a catalyst for Nigerian and African sovereignty in the digital financial age, ensuring our markets are primary participants in the global digital asset revolution.”
With this capital and a deepened product alliance, Flutterwave will accelerate its goal to bridge traditional financial systems with next-generation digital asset infrastructure. Building on its established scale – having raised over US$500m and processed over a billion transactions worth over US$50bn – Flutterwave is positioned to unlock massive economic potential for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and global enterprises operating across Africa.
