Flutterwave, Africa’s most valuable fintech company, has raised a Series E round at a $3.25 billion valuation after an investment from Ripple, a United States-based blockchain payments company.
Flutterwave declined to disclose how much Ripple invested.
“Ripple did invest significantly in Flutterwave, an actual cash investment, so they are now an equity shareholder of the company,” Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Flutterwave’s founder and chief executive, told TechCabal on a call on Monday.
Ripple’s investment marks Flutterwave’s latest move into stablecoins as both companies integrate RLUSD, Ripple’s stablecoin, into Flutterwave’s payment infrastructure, allowing the African payments giant’s merchants and consumers to send, hold, and convert money using stablecoins.
Agboola said three factors led Flutterwave to choose Ripple: its technology infrastructure, regulatory credibility, and the ability to move money more cheaply and quickly across borders.
Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin and the XRP Ledger will plug into Flutterwave’s payment rails to power cross-border settlement across the continent. For Ripple, it is an entry point into Africa’s fast-growing market for dollar-denominated payments, which Mastercard projects will reach $1.5 trillion by 2030.
“Cross-border value movement is one of the most underserved and highest-growth markets globally right now,” Agboola said.
“That is where the synergy with Ripple comes in. We bring Africa’s infrastructure at scale. Ripple brings expertise in digital settlement and stablecoins. Together, this helps solve actual customer problems.”
Flutterwave is betting that pairing its merchant base and compliance footprint with stablecoin rails will pull a larger share of cross-border volume onto its platform. Agboola forecasted at least a 30% jump in Flutterwave’s total stablecoin volumes from the Ripple deal and described the broader opportunity in cross-border flows as “massive”.
The new valuation is a modest step up from the $3 billion Flutterwave reached in February 2022, when it closed a $250 million Series D led by B Capital, a global venture capital firm.
Agboola said the round was a primary investment, with the cash going onto Flutterwave’s balance sheet, and that no secondary sale of existing shares had taken place. A secondary is possible later, he said.
While a $250 million bump in valuation is a strong outcome for most African startups, for Flutterwave, it is a modest increase, particularly given the licencing wins and acquisition spree the fintech has pursued since it last raised money.
For Flutterwave’s existing investors, it also means reduced ownership in the company without a big bump in the value of their stake.
“Valuation is useful, but it should not be confused with value,” he said. “A higher valuation can be validating. But valuation is also an opinion at a point in time. What matters is: is the company building sustainably? Are you serving customers well? Valuation, for me, is not the objective. It is a byproduct.”
What Ripple adds
The investment lands as Flutterwave pulls more of its payments stack in-house and pushes toward a one-stop financial platform. The company acquired a Nigerian microfinance banking licence and the open-banking startup Mono in a January 2026 acquisition, and has rebuilt its Send app into an infrastructure layer for currency wallets and stablecoin balances.
“We are now running a multi-product platform. We have banking, we have payments, we have everything, and now we have stablecoins,” Agboola said. “That is in line with our goal to be a one-stop shop for financial services.”
“Nobody has our infrastructure at scale right now,” he added. “We do not see competition for this.”
Flutterwave has spent years building compliance frameworks and banking rails across multiple markets, infrastructure Agboola called expensive and difficult for rivals to replicate. The RLUSD integration will go live in every country where Flutterwave operates, he said, shaped by the specific requirements of each regulator.
How RLUSD fits into the product
RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, launched in December 2024 and has grown into one of the largest US-regulated stablecoins, with a market value of roughly $1.26 billion. It is backed one-to-one by cash and short-term US government securities and runs on both Ethereum and the XRP Ledger.
RLUSD becomes one of several stablecoins Flutterwave’s customers can pick at the point of a transaction. Agboola compared it to choosing a bank.
“Depending on your preference as a customer, you will be able to choose your preferred stablecoin for the transaction,” he said. “It is the same as choosing a bank. You choose your preferred bank and proceed.”
Users will be able to hold RLUSD directly on Flutterwave. The on-ramp and off-ramp, Agboola said, run through a customer’s bank: deposit local currency, go to the platform, choose the currency and the stablecoin, set the exchange rate, and transfer. He said the same flow works in reverse, moving from stablecoin back to fiat.
Flutterwave is not tying itself to a single chain or coin. Agboola said the company is agnostic and supports every stablecoin.
The Ripple deal joins a stablecoin stack the company has been assembling for over a year: it joined the Circle Payment Network in 2025, named Polygon its default settlement chain in October 2025, launched merchant stablecoin wallets with Turnkey and Nuvion in January 2026, and added Stripe-incubated Tempo as a settlement layer in June 2026. RLUSD and the XRP Ledger now sit inside that multi-rail setup.
