NALA has secured an initial $25 million credit facility from Liquidity, with room to expand the arrangement to at least $50 million, as the Tanzanian fintech seeks additional working capital to pre-fund customer balances and keep pace with demand that has at times outpaced its balance sheet.
The deal was arranged through Mars Growth Capital, the joint venture backed by Liquidity and MUFG Bank, Japan’s largest lender.
For NALA, the structure matters because it provides the company with access to debt capital for operations without forcing it to return to the market for another equity round.
The company said it still holds more than half of the $40 million it raised in mid-2024, so this facility helps it fund growth without putting immediate pressure on shareholder ownership.
What makes this raise notable is the direction NALA has taken since its early days as a remittance app founded in Tanzania. It has grown into a stablecoin payments infrastructure company serving businesses and consumers across the US, Europe, and emerging markets.
That shift also mirrors a wider move in the payments market, where stablecoin usage, especially in B2B transfers, has expanded sharply in the last 18 months, with monthly volumes crossing $30 billion by early 2026, according to figures cited from Artemis Analytics and McKinsey.
Benjamin Fernandes, NALA’s founder and chief executive, framed the facility as a relief valve for a business that was growing too fast for its funding structure.
He said the company had at one point been doubling every other quarter and outpaced its ability to pre-fund payments in both directions across corridors. In his telling, Liquidity moved quickly and built a tailored capital solution that gives NALA the cash it needs to support customer accounts and move into its next stage of growth.
The numbers behind that growth are hard to ignore. NALA’s infrastructure payments business, which runs under the Rafiki brand, went from zero to $1 billion in transaction volume in 18 months, based on company disclosures earlier this year.
The company says its business grew 5x in the past year and revenue rose 10x, driven by demand for compliant stablecoin on- and off-ramps in markets where correspondent banking remains slow, costly, and often unreliable.
Rafiki, which launched in March 2024, now supports NALA’s consumer app and a growing list of enterprise clients including MoneyGram, TransferGo, and Cadana. It connects to 249 banks and 26 mobile money services across 16 countries, giving global businesses a single API for moving money into and out of emerging markets.
NALA’s choice to raise debt rather than another equity round feels deliberate. Its 2024 Series A, a $40 million round led by Acrew Capital with participation from DST Global, Norrsken22, HOF Capital, and angel investors including Ryan King and Vlad Tenev, was already one of the larger Africa-focused fintech fundraises of that period.
With more than half of that capital still available, the company is in a rare position: well funded on equity, yet still constrained by the cash demands of transaction settlement.
That is where credit becomes a better fit than dilution. This kind of financing usually shows up when a fintech has crossed from story to infrastructure. Equity helps you build the machine, while debt helps you keep the machine fed once volumes start rising faster than settlement cycles.
For a company like NALA, the test is whether the enterprise pipeline turns into a sustained flow at the scale this facility assumes. Liquidity seems to think it will, and NALA is betting that corridor growth will justify the structure.
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