Stablecoins now settle over $300 billion worth of transactions every day. Yet if you hold stablecoins and want to buy groceries, pay a bill, or withdraw cash, you still have to convert them to regular money first. That extra step, the off-ramp, is not just inconvenient. It adds cost, complexity, and friction that slows the entire system down.
A Paris-based startup called Kulipa wants to eliminate that step entirely.
On 2 April, Kulipa announced it had raised $6.2 million in seed funding, co-led by Flourish Ventures and crypto-native investment firm 1kx, with White Star Capital and Fabric Ventures also participating. The round brings the company’s total funding to $9.2 million since it was founded in 2023.
What Kulipa actually does
Kulipa is not a consumer product. Most people will never hear its name. Instead, it is infrastructure: the plumbing that other fintech companies, digital banks, and crypto wallets plug into when they want to give their users a payment card funded directly from a stablecoin balance.
Think of it like this. A fintech platform that holds customer funds in USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin, would traditionally have to first convert those funds into regular dollars before issuing a card against them. That conversion costs money, takes time, and requires separate regulatory approvals. Kulipa skips that entirely. It verifies a user’s stablecoin balance on-chain and settles transactions directly against it, while the card itself works anywhere Visa or Mastercard is accepted, from retail shops to ATMs.
For fintech companies, that matters for another reason. Becoming a card issuer on your own means applying for principal membership with Visa or Mastercard in each market, a process that can take years and costs significantly more than most startups can absorb. Kulipa handles all of that, plus payment processing, fraud detection, and pre-funding, and delivers it to partners through a single API integration. Kulipa also assumes fraud liability on the cards it issues, removing a significant legal and financial burden from its partners.
Why Africa is central to this story
Kulipa operates what it calls a local-first model, meaning it holds actual regulatory licences in each market it serves rather than routing everything through a single jurisdiction. It currently has regulated issuing coverage in three markets: the European Union, Argentina, and Nigeria. A US expansion is underway through BIN sponsorship.
Nigeria’s inclusion is notable. Among just three markets in the world where Kulipa is fully operational and regulated, Nigeria sits alongside the entire EU and Argentina. That reflects where stablecoin adoption is already happening at scale. Nigeria has consistently ranked among the highest globally for peer-to-peer stablecoin volume, driven by currency instability and restricted access to foreign exchange. Businesses and individuals in the country have leaned heavily on dollar-pegged assets precisely because the traditional banking system makes dollar access difficult.
Flutterwave, Africa’s most prominent payments infrastructure company with its East Africa headquarters in Nairobi, is among Kulipa’s 20 signed customers. Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola described the partnership as a way to “extend stablecoin value into globally accepted payments in a compliant, scalable way.” That aligns with what Tech-ish has tracked over the past year: stablecoins shifting from a niche settlement tool to a foundational layer for African fintech infrastructure, from HoneyCoin’s $4.9 million raise to Visa’s stablecoin pre-funding pilot for Visa Direct.
Flourish Ventures, the $850 million evergreen fund backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has now backed Flutterwave, HoneyCoin, and Kulipa. That is not a coincidence. The firm appears to be building a thesis across multiple positions in stablecoin-enabled payments infrastructure, covering orchestration, settlement, and now card issuance.
Traction and team
Kulipa launched its infrastructure in February 2025 and has already issued more than 120,000 cards. It has seen 70 percent month-on-month growth in transaction volume, though the company has not disclosed absolute transaction figures.
The founding team carries credentials worth paying attention to. CEO Axel Cateland previously led global deployments of Apple Pay and Google Pay at Mastercard. CTO Michael Shynar built commerce infrastructure at WhatsApp and spent nearly a decade as a staff engineer at Google. Head of Compliance Benoit Roger brings regulatory experience from Binance and Nickel Bank, a French neobank that was acquired by BNP Paribas. The team sits at 20 people and is growing.
The bigger picture
For fintechs operating in Africa, Kulipa offers something that has been genuinely difficult to access: a compliant, scalable route to card issuance without the capital intensity of going direct to card networks. The question, as with most infrastructure plays targeting emerging markets, is speed of regulatory expansion. Nigeria is covered. Kenya, a major fintech market, is not yet. Neither is Ghana, Ethiopia, or South Africa.
The funding will go toward expanding regulated issuing coverage across Europe, Latin America, and Africa, and towards the ongoing US expansion. How quickly Kulipa can extend its compliance footprint into additional African markets will determine how central it becomes to the continent’s stablecoin story.
For now, it is one of the few players that has already connected the dots between onchain settlement and a physical card you can tap at a supermarket. That last mile has been the missing piece for long enough.
