Many remarkable stories can trace their beginnings to the University of Oxford. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings there. Between 2021 and 2022, a conversation about stablecoins between two Master of Business Administration (MBA) students on the school’s basketball court sparked a story that would eventually become a startup.
At the time of the conversation, Prince Nnamdi Ekeh was the co-CEO of Konga Group following the merger with his online marketplace Yudala, giving him a front-row seat to the challenges of payments and foreign exchange. Zachary Schwartzman, the second of the courtside pair, had gotten interested in African tech after covering the initial public offerings (IPOs) of Jumia as a Wall Street analyst.
Their conversation circled the use of stablecoins and how they could solve real problems in markets like Nigeria and across Africa. Years later, they would start Stablyl, a fintech startup co-founded by Ekeh, Schwartzman, and Michael Anyi, a software engineer with over a decade of experience building financial infrastructure.
Emerging from stealth with a $2.7 million pre-seed investment led by Konga, the startup is a liquidity exchange for financial institutions and payment service providers, built to make foreign exchange liquidity easier to access and settlements nearly instantaneous.
