On Monday, Africa’s tech ecosystem woke up to major news: Africa’s largest payments startup, Flutterwave, has bought Mono, a Nigerian open-banking startup, in an all-stock deal reportedly worth between $25 million and $40 million. Mono will retain its CEO and operate independently.
Between the lines: Mono’s open-finance rails give Flutterwave deeper visibility into the data behind the payments—customer accounts, their cash flows and financial behaviour—it processes, which is strategic. Flutterwave can evolve beyond a payment processor into a financial institution capable of offering credit-related services for merchants, lenders, and enterprises, while also strengthening its core payments stack through account-to-account transfers.
The deal is reminiscent of when Mastercard acquired Finicity for $825 million to integrate Finicity’s open‑banking APIs and real‑time financial data access into its own open banking platform. After the acquisition, Mastercard now supports lending, risk scoring, identity verification, and bank payments.
The all-stock structure also tells its own story. For Flutterwave, conserving cash while using equity to absorb a complementary platform reduces balance-sheet strain and aligns long-term incentives (read: its profitability search).Â
Some of the online chatter has fixated on the deal valuation, noting that even the upper end of the reported price represents little more than a 2x multiple on Mono’s $15 million Series A raised in 2021. While the modest 2x return doesn’t justify venture capital scale, there’s an opportunity for early backers to get higher returns when Flutterwave lists on a stock exchange.
Mono CEO Abdulhamid Hassan told TechCrunch the business was stable and that this was not a distress sale, but rather the outcome of a strong working relationship between the two startups. The deal allows Hassan, a product guy to the core, to focus on building without the distractions of solo fundraising, while Flutterwave gains a specialised lead to scale its infrastructure as its CEO, Olugbenga “GB” Agboola continues to navigate the global market.
Importantly, the acquisition reinforces that growth-stage startups are becoming comfortable bringing in bigger, complementary players in-house rather than operating in silos, as they double down on their strengths. We saw it last year with Chowdeck and Mira—albeit at a much smaller scale—this new deal carries on that trend.