Kotani Pay

Kotani Pay is a Nairobi-based Web3 infrastructure company that bridges blockchain networks and African payment rails, letting businesses and individuals move value between digital assets and local currencies through mobile money services, bank transfers, and USSD-based wallets — no internet connection or bank account required.

The Problem

Financial exclusion remains severe across Sub-Saharan Africa. Traditional banking infrastructure is sparse in many regions, yet mobile phone penetration is high. While blockchain and stablecoin adoption have accelerated — on-chain transaction volume in Sub-Saharan Africa reached $205 billion between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52% year-on-year increase — the last mile into local currency remains a persistent barrier. Converting a stablecoin to Kenyan shillings or South African rand on a basic feature phone, in a rural area with no data connection, requires purpose-built infrastructure.

How It Works

Kotani Pay operates as middleware: APIs that sit between blockchain protocols and Africa's fragmented local payment networks. On the technical side, the platform detects incoming cryptocurrency deposits within one to two minutes, handles exchange rate calculations across currency pairs, and routes outbound transfers to mobile money operators or bank accounts.

The signature feature is USSD wallet access. USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) is the dial-code technology that underpins mobile banking across Africa — it works on any handset, on any carrier, with no data connection. Kotani Pay integrates USSD into a blockchain wallet interface, allowing users to cash in and cash out digital assets by dialling a short code and navigating a menu. This makes the platform accessible to gig workers, rural farmers, cross-border migrants, and recipients of aid disbursements who lack smartphones or reliable connectivity.

For businesses, Kotani Pay provides a B2B API stack covering on-ramp (fiat to crypto), off-ramp (crypto to fiat), stablecoin settlement, fiat wallet management, and last-mile payout services. Enterprise clients — crypto exchanges, DeFi applications, remittance companies — integrate once and reach local payment channels across multiple African markets.

Products

On-Ramp and Off-Ramp APIs form the core offering: documented endpoints for depositing fiat via mobile money or card, triggering stablecoin issuance, and reversing the flow for withdrawals, with automatic refunds on failed transfers.

USSD Wallet enables blockchain transactions on feature phones without internet access, making Kotani Pay one of the few operators running offline crypto cash-in/cash-out at scale in Africa.

Stablecoin Settlement Solutions give businesses access to stablecoin and fiat liquidity pools for cross-border transactions, addressing slow and expensive traditional correspondent banking.

White-label APIs let DApps and crypto platforms embed Kotani Pay's African payment rails under their own product surface.

The platform supports USDC, USDT, and Celo Dollars (cUSD) across multiple blockchain networks including Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, and Celo, with the website noting compatibility across more than 15 networks in total.

Geography and Compliance

Active markets include Kenya, Ghana, Zambia, and South Africa, with expansion underway into Tanzania, Rwanda, and Francophone Africa. The company holds a Financial Service Provider registration with South Africa's Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA licence number 53594), a significant regulatory milestone for a blockchain infrastructure company operating in that jurisdiction.

Team and History

Kotani Pay was founded in 2020. The leadership team includes CEO and co-founder Felix Macharia, COO and co-founder Samuel Kariuki, CMO and co-founder Brian Kimotho, and CPO Jonathan Morgan. The company expanded its engineering capability by acquiring Fuhlstack, a Nigerian blockchain backend provider, which brought co-founder Lemuel Okoli onto the team and added Reconset (Reconciliation-as-a-Service) and Money Ledger (Ledger-as-a-Service) to the product catalogue.

Funding and Backers

In September 2023, Kotani Pay raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by P1 Ventures, with participation from DCG/Luno, Flori Ventures, Adaverse, Peer VC, and Wuri Ventures. At the time of that raise, the platform had processed approximately $23 million in total transfers, with an average enterprise transaction of around $150,000, reflecting a B2B focus. Earlier backing came from the Stellar Community Fund ($100,000 grant) and the UNICEF Crypto Innovation Fund.

In October 2025, Tether — the issuer of USDT, the world's largest stablecoin by market cap — announced a strategic investment in Kotani Pay, with the amount undisclosed. The partnership is designed to embed USDT within Africa's digital payments infrastructure. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino described the goal as empowering enterprises and individuals to access digital assets while addressing inflation and currency volatility in African economies.

Beyond private capital, Kotani Pay has received recognition from UNICEF, Gitcoin, IBM, Stellar, and the US Commerce Department.

Business Model

Kotani Pay earns interchange fees averaging approximately 1% of gross transaction volume across both on-ramp and off-ramp flows.

Context

Cross-border remittances into Africa carry some of the highest fees in the world relative to transfer value. Kotani Pay's infrastructure addresses this by allowing businesses to settle in stablecoins internationally and convert to local currency at the last mile, bypassing the correspondent banking chains that drive up cost and settlement time. The USSD layer extends this access to populations that traditional fintech — which typically requires a smartphone and a data plan — cannot serve.