Lipaworld is a Pan-African borderless financial platform founded in 2023 by Jonathan Katende and Victor Bagu, both immigrants who experienced the high cost and difficulty of moving money across borders. The platform is designed for individuals and businesses in emerging markets, especially immigrants, freelancers, and small businesses, enabling them to earn, spend, and send money seamlessly.
The company uses a mobile app and business dashboard to offer a comprehensive solution that combines stablecoin rails with a curated merchant network. Key features include a self-custodial stablecoin wallet, a virtual USD bank account for receiving international payments, yield generation capabilities, and stablecoin-linked cards.
A core feature is the digital voucher marketplace, which allows users to instantly buy essential services like groceries, airtime, transport tickets, or healthcare for loved ones back home. This ensures value reaches the intended recipient transparently and instantly, contrasting with traditional remittance players who often focus only on sending the money. Lipaworld’s competitive edge lies in this value-added service offering and its self-custodial wallet, which grants users full control of their funds.
Since its founding, Lipaworld has secured venture capital from a US investor and is currently finalizing its pre-seed funding round. Adoption has been strong, with steady month-on-month growth observed from diaspora users supporting families in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The company is also growing its B2B pipeline by partnering with fintech and corporate entities for cross-border disbursements and employee payouts, with future plans to expand into the UK and Canada to reach larger diaspora populations. Lipaworld generates revenue through a combination of transaction fees, commissions, yield, and spread margins on voucher and stablecoin transactions.
