Mallick Bolakale laughed as he took me back to the early 2010s, when buying items from eBay in Nigeria required navigating an underground system.
Then, a Nigerian needed a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to create an encrypted address and a broker with a foreign bank card and a shipping address in the United States to order items from the online marketplace, he recalled.
Buyers would first send money to the broker’s naira account; the broker would convert it to dollars and pay for the item with his foreign card. The broker would then receive the items at his address before arranging their shipment to Nigeria.
Bolakale, who at the time was studying law while repairing and reselling gadgets on the side to save money for law school, helped people buy electronics from eBay. Then he decided to risk the ₦500,000 (about $3,000 at the time) he had saved for law school.
He used the money to buy gadgets like laptops from eBay, hoping to resell them at a profit before school resumed. The process worked the same way it always had until a friend, using his laptop, refreshed the eBay page without turning on a VPN.
eBay detected the local Internet Protocol (IP) address—a unique numerical label assigned to every device connected to the internet—flagged the transaction as suspicious activity, and cancelled the order.
That should have been the end of the story, but the broker refused to reconnect his card for the refund process, worried the card details could be misused while the refund was being processed.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bolakale recalled, “that’s how I lost my law school fees.”
More than a decade later, he co-founded a startup designed to solve the kind of cross-border friction that ruined that transaction.
Founded in July 2023 with Kelechi Oti and Charles Idem, Startbutton Africa operates a merchant of records (MOR) system that helps businesses expand across African markets without setting up local payment operations, compliance systems, tax processes, and regulatory relationships from scratch. The startup assists businesses in new countries with payment collections and tax compliance.
Businesses entering new countries often have to rebuild banking relationships, secure licences, embed payment integrations, and set up other compliance structures. Startbutton wants to simplify that process by sitting underneath expansion across the continent. Today, the company says it operates across 15 African markets, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda.
Day 1: Interrupted vacations and Twitter DMs
In 2022, Bolakale was in Rwanda, taking a break from work, when an unnamed company reached out to him, saying they were struggling to access Nigeria’s local payment infrastructure without local operational structures in place.
A year earlier, the Central Bank of Nigeria had discontinued the sale of foreign exchange to Bureau De Change operators, worsening dollar scarcity and disrupting how individuals and businesses accessed foreign currency.
By then, Bolakale had spent the past decade working across law, compliance, and fintech; he worked on compliance at Stripe-owned fintech Paystack and advised payment companies navigating regulatory and operational challenges. He had also seen how difficult expansion became once businesses crossed into markets with different tax obligations and payment infrastructure. So, he started building a workaround.
“I didn’t really see it as something that was going to be a business,” Bolakale said. “I just felt like it was something I was doing to help businesses.”
He incorporated Startbutton in 2023 and began manually helping businesses create local structures, connect with payment providers, and receive payments locally. Because accessing foreign currency had become difficult and expensive due to CBN’s directive, Bolakale listed his house on Airbnb, an online marketplace that lets people rent out their homes, and used the dollar payouts from bookings to settle merchants while collecting naira locally from customers.
“It’s almost like what you were doing on eBay,” I pointed out during our conversation. “Exactly,” Bolakale replied. “This time, it was me doing it as opposed to using a broker.”
By 2023, Bolakale and his co-founders had begun building Startbutton into an actual product. Then came the tweet that validated the idea.
Bolakale recalled seeing a post from the founder of Bible Buddy, a faith-based AI startup, complaining on Twitter (now x) that despite the existence of fintechs, he still could not accept international payments because his startup was based in the United States. “That’s exactly what we’re solving for,” he remembered thinking.
He replied to the tweet and sent the founder a direct message. Bible Buddy eventually tested the platform, requested a few changes, then became Startbutton’s first customer.
“It was the first time it dawned on me that this was actually starting,” Bolakale said.
Day 100: Frozen accounts and stablecoin settlements
Weeks after Startbutton launched, it ran into its first major crisis. According to Bolakale, the company had just closed a $50,000 friends-and-family round to hire people and properly begin operations. But shortly after the funds landed in the company’s Wise account, the account was frozen.
According to Bolakale, Wise flagged the account because Startbutton was using it for financial services and settlements, activities the platform did not expect the account to be used for. At the time, Startbutton was still a five-man team, trying to stabilise operations across its first markets: Nigeria, Rwanda, Ghana, South Africa, and the United States.
“During that time, I self-funded the salaries,” he said. “The founders were not earning salaries.”
In the two months that Wise held the account, Startbutton began settling merchants through stablecoin transactions, Bolakale said.
By October 2023, Bolakale said that Wise released the funds, while Startbutton closed a $200,000 funding round.
Day 500: Scaling down and structuring
In addition to its merchant-of-record operations, Startbutton helped businesses incorporate locally, set up operational structures, navigate compliance processes, and, in some cases, support physical-goods expansion into African markets.
Bolakale explained that at first, the flexibility helped Startbutton grow. Still, over time, he questioned whether the company was building something scalable or simply becoming a collection of expansion services for customer requests.
“We realised that if we continued doing some of these things, we were just going to become another company’s feature,” he said. “So, we focused on those core payments products and dropped the incorporation product.”
In 2024, the startup underwent additional internal changes, such as setting up more structured teams with its 15-person team, including operations, engineering, sales, and customer-support departments, according to its CEO. Startbutton expanded further into Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire to give businesses more market options across Africa.
Following its $200,000 round, the startup expanded its fundraising efforts to $500,000 in 2024, Bolakale said. By day 500, Startbutton was no longer operating like a stitched-together workaround.
Day 1000: The years of growth and scale
According to Bolakale, Startbutton’s revenue and total payment volume (TPV) in 2025 grew five times more than the previous year. He added that the startup also expanded its partnership network to about 70 partners across payments, treasury, compliance, and operational infrastructure.
In 2025, Startbutton launched in seven Francophone African countries—Benin, Togo, Senegal, Mali, Guinea-Conakry, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon—to enable more companies to enter these markets and accept local payments.
Bolakale said Startbutton now primarily generates revenue through commissions on transactions processed through its platform, adding that the startup currently generates annual revenue in the $2 million to $5 million range.
Startbutton operates in a competitive market alongside startups such as Klasha, dLocal, Flocash, and Kyshi, which offer cross-border payments and expansion services across multiple markets. However, Bolakale had noted that the startup’s grasp of compliance sets it apart from competitors.
Now, according to him, the company is focused more on building the systems needed for long-term scale.
“2025 was growth; this year is scale,” he said. “We’re focusing now on putting things in place that help us scale. We want to essentially achieve market dominance.”