Do not index
Do not index
Today is a big day. I’m excited to announce that we’ve closed a $4.9 million funding round led by Flourish Ventures with participation from Visa Ventures, Lava, TLCom, Antler, Musha Ventures, 4DX Ventures, Stellar Development Foundation, James Waugh (Fire Eyes), & Vasily Shapovalov (Lido Co-Founder)!
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
If I had to pick a quote that pretty much sums up the journey building HoneyCoin, it would be this one. Over 4 years ago, during the height of COVID when the whole world was on lockdown, I was crazy enough to start this company. The vision was simple - build an operating system for money to be moved, managed and spent that is built for the world we live in today and the future we are all walking into tomorrow. I spent months learning, interviewing, and absorbing as much content as possible; and many, many nights and weekends building the first iteration of the product, completely oblivious to how far it would go.
We started with building for creators & freelancers, every time I’d introduce HoneyCoin I would say we’re building “Gumroad for Africa, but with fiat and stablecoins” - we were super early and saw a lot of traction on this front, but quickly realized that this problem was much, much bigger and so in 2021 we launched our consumer app. The mission was the same, our target market just got bigger.
This was the first time I’d felt product market fit with HoneyCoin, servers crashing, strange bugs in prod and customer complaints swelling because we were growing faster than we thought we would - we were probably getting 2-4 hours of sleep but it was glorious and in November 2021 we hit our first six figure month in volume, this is Dominic, my CPO sharing this stat in our #celebrate-wins Slack channel.
And so we kept shipping, scaling, improving our rails and all while growth closely followed the amount of hours and effort we were putting in. Here’s a snapshot of how quickly our consumer platform was growing in the first 6 months of 2022:
This story seems too good be true so far but to be fair so far, it is - nothing about our journey has been easy, I could tell you about how the banking partner we were using that same year froze our funds with no cause and I spent 7 days working to get it back, all the social engineering attempts from fraudsters who began impersonating me to try and defraud our customers, when we had to pause card payments on our consumer app for months due to too many card testing attacks, that time a competitor raised $45M and we knew our world is ending and hundreds of other war stories to get here. Today as we celebrate this milestone, we wanted it to also serve as a reminder to other builders, entrepreneurs and dreamers out there that it is 100% possible to build something amazing from humble beginnings which is why a large portion of this post was focused on how we got here. Fast forward to now, HoneyCoin is one of the fastest growing full-stack payment orchestration platforms for consumers and businesses. Providing infrastructure that allows our customers to collect payments, move money in real-time using stablecoins and traditional rails, as well as issue bank accounts, debit cards, or wallets in over 45+ markets and across four continents and today we’re:
- 🏦 Processing over $150M per month in volume.
- 👥 Serving millions of end users
- 🌍 Live in 45+ Countries
Licensed across key markets including the US, Canada, EU, and key African jurisdictions, with direct integrations into banks and telecom operators, including partnerships with MoneyGram, UBA Bank, and Stripe. Our platform is already being used by high-growth businesses and fintechs, including Cedar Money, TerraPay, and Jiji, underlining our increasing adoption across varying industries.
“HoneyCoin is tackling real-world challenges in cross-border payments and financial access across Africa,” said Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto, Visa. “It’s a strong example of how stablecoins can unlock more efficient and inclusive payment solutions in emerging markets.”
Speaking on the investment, Flourish Ventures Principal Efayomi Carr said: “We first backed HoneyCoin in 2021 based on David’s technical expertise and regulatory vision,” said Efayomi Carr, Principal at Flourish Ventures. “Since then, he’s built a licensed, profitable, and high-growth infrastructure platform powering nearly 300 financial institutions and processing billions in transactions annually. This follow-on investment reflects our deep confidence in HoneyCoin’s results to date and potential to lead the next generation of compliant, blockchain-enabled finance across Africa.”
HoneyCoin is 15 years in the making - from writing my first line of code at 10 years old to starting the company at 19, and now running it at 24, I’m living my dream. And I wouldn’t be able to do this if it weren't for God, my team, family, our investors and you, our customers, who have all played a key role on this journey. I write this with a heart full of gratitude and this round is a key milestone on our journey to build the future of money and finance for the world, starting in emerging markets. It’s not a secret, the work will not be easy, but we are up for the challenge.
Thank you for reading,
