Pretium Finance

Pretium is a Nairobi-based payment infrastructure startup that makes USDT and USDC spendable for everyday transactions across Africa, connecting on-chain stablecoins to mobile money networks, bank rails, and merchant point-of-sale systems in ten countries.

The Problem

Sub-Saharan Africa has accumulated a meaningful population of stablecoin holders — workers paid across borders, remittance recipients, freelancers, and traders. But holding stablecoins and spending them have historically been separate problems. Converting USDT to Kenyan shillings, Ghanaian cedis, or Congolese francs required finding a peer-to-peer counterparty, accepting a punishing spread, and waiting for settlement. Pretium CEO and co-founder Derrick Bundi built the company after running into exactly this friction himself: he received USDT as payment but had no direct path to spending it. Pretium's founding premise is that if stablecoins are to function as money in Africa, the off-ramp infrastructure must be as frictionless as the assets themselves.

Core Mechanism

Pretium sits between the on-chain world and Africa's existing payment rails. On the crypto side, it accepts USDT and USDC (with support for Mento's cUSD) from users or partner integrations. On the fiat side, it settles into mobile money accounts (M-Pesa, MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money), bank transfers, paybills, and merchant till numbers. The company generates revenue on the exchange spread for each transaction and requires no capital pre-funding from API partners, handling liquidity management in-house.

The platform operates four primary surfaces:

Offramp converts on-chain stablecoin payments into local mobile money or bank payouts. A business receiving USDT from an international customer can route that value directly to a Kenyan mobile wallet within seconds.

Onramp runs in reverse: it accepts local fiat and delivers stablecoins to a specified wallet address, enabling merchants or individuals to acquire stablecoins through familiar payment channels rather than centralised exchanges.

Checkout is a hosted payment flow businesses embed into their own applications. Partners receive checkout keys and can track order lifecycles through the API without building their own crypto-to-fiat settlement logic.

AI Agents (MCP) is a newer surface that exposes Pretium's payment capabilities through the Model Context Protocol, making it callable by AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT. This allows autonomous agents to send money, pay bills, and settle invoices within programmable spend policies — per-transaction limits, daily caps, and monthly budgets — without human initiation at each step.

Products

The consumer app, available on Android via Google Play, lets individuals use stablecoins as a daily spending wallet. Users can pay at grocery stores, supermarkets, restaurants, and petrol stations, settle utility bills (electricity, TV subscriptions, mobile data, airtime), and send cross-border transfers with fees as low as 1%. The app targets both crypto-native users and people new to digital assets, positioning stablecoins as a practical alternative to volatile local currencies rather than a speculative instrument.

The B2B REST API serves fintechs, payment providers, and enterprises that want to offer stablecoin settlement without building their own liquidity infrastructure. The API (versioned at /v1 and /v2) uses standard JSON POST patterns, returns a consistent response envelope, and supports currency-specific routing across each of Pretium's ten supported markets. Authentication uses partner consumer keys, with a separate checkout key for hosted flows.

Geographic Coverage

Pretium currently operates in Kenya (KES), Uganda (UGX), Nigeria (NGN), Ghana (GHS), Malawi (MWK), DR Congo (CDF), Ethiopia (ETB), Tanzania (TZS), Zambia (ZMW), and Rwanda (RWF). Settlement channels vary by country and include M-Pesa, MTN, and Airtel Money at the mobile layer, plus bank wires for markets where mobile penetration is lower.

Traction

As of mid-2026 Pretium reports 9.1 million USD in total transaction value processed, approximately 52,000 consumer app users, and more than 40 businesses using the B2B API. The platform claims a 99.99% success rate across over 600,000 transactions. The company describes 20% of its transaction volume running on Base, with Celo and BNB also supported as settlement chains. The platform has been covered by Disrupt Africa and featured at Africa Tech Summit Nairobi 2026.

Token

Pretium has introduced a PRT token with an associated earnings programme. Details on the token's distribution, supply, and governance mechanics are not fully documented in public sources as of this writing.

Team

Three co-founders lead the company out of Nairobi:

• Derrick Bundi — CEO and co-founder, previously working in African fintech
• Chris Muthoga — CPO and co-founder
• Faith Kinyua — CFO and co-founder

The company employs fewer than ten people. No external audit reports or security documentation for the smart contract layer have been publicly released.

Ecosystem Fit

Pretium addresses one of the clearest practical gaps in African stablecoin adoption: the last mile between self-custodied digital dollars and real-world spending. Rather than competing with remittance incumbents on price alone, it layers a developer API and AI-agent interface on top of regulated payment service provider partnerships, positioning itself as infrastructure for the next generation of fintech applications. The MCP integration is a deliberate bet on agentic commerce — the idea that AI systems, not just human users, will increasingly initiate payment flows, and that programmable spend controls will matter as much as raw throughput.

The company is currently raising additional capital for continental expansion and regulatory compliance work. With a consumer app showing meaningful retention and a B2B API already adopted by dozens of businesses, Pretium represents one of the more operationally grounded efforts to make dollar-denominated stablecoins functional money in emerging markets.