African payments company NALA has secured up to US$50 million in credit financing to fuel its global expansion, product development and the build-out of its next-generation neobank.
NALA is an African payments company and money transfer app that enables users to make secure and reliable payments from Europe, the UK and US to Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana in seconds. In 2023, it launched in the European Union (EU), adding 19 new countries to its list of send countries and aiding its mission of connecting Africans globally, and last year the company banked a US$40 million funding round. It has now added to that with a US$50 million credit facility from Liquidity, the global AI-driven private credit and technology provider, through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and MUFG Bank Ltd. The facility is non-dilutive.
An initial US$25 million facility comes with a scale-up option of at least US$50 million, providing working capital to fuel NALA’s global expansion, product development and the build-out of its next-generation neobank — all powered by its global stablecoin infrastructure.
“The financing from Liquidity validates our vision of building the definitive stablecoin payments infrastructure for the long term. At some point, our business was more than doubling every other quarter – we grew faster than we could handle pre-funding for single-direction payments, and everything broke. Liquidity came in quickly and was highly flexible, so their tailored capital is a lifeline for us. It provides the cash required for NALA to pre-fund customer accounts and unlock our next phase of growth,” said Benjamin Fernandes, founder and CEO of NALA.
Paul Brodie, global head of investments at Liquidity, said his team had structured a facility that accounts for NALA’s compliant stablecoin rails, real-time cross-border payments and rapid growth in emerging market corridors.
“We conducted extensive bottom-up due diligence on NALA, stress-testing the model across a range of scenarios and created a bespoke, highly scalable facility that matches the sophistication of NALA’s operations,” he said.