Nigeria’s Alerzo has begun winding down its network of Singapore-registered special purpose vehicles, a move that signals deepening corporate distress for the B2B e-commerce startup already fighting a ₦4.38 billion debt claim and a court-ordered asset freeze in Lagos.
Notices published in Singapore’s Government Gazette between April 21 and April 27, 2026 confirm that at least four Alerzo-linked entities have been dissolved or slated for striking off. The list includes Alerzo Bridge Financing Pte. Ltd., Alerzo Capital Pte. Ltd., Alerzo New SPV Pte. Ltd., and Alerzo Series A Pte. Ltd. A sub-fund under Singapore’s Variable Capital Companies framework — Alerzo 1A — was also formally dissolved on April 20.
The timing is not incidental. The dissolutions arrive roughly two months after a Federal High Court in Lagos granted Moniepoint Microfinance Bank a Mareva injunction freezing Alerzo’s accounts, following what the bank described as an 88% default on a ₦5 billion working capital loan drawn in January 2025.
Why Dissolving SPVs After a Legal Crisis Is Never Just Housekeeping
Crucially, Alerzo Pte. Ltd. — the main Singapore holding vehicle and a named co-defendant in the Nigerian suit — has not filed for bankruptcy and remains on the active register. What is being wound down are the financing and investment subsidiaries: the bridge financing arms, the capital vehicle, and the series funding SPV that would have been used to structure investor inflows during earlier fundraising rounds.
In Singapore, striking off a company requires a formal declaration that the entity has ceased operations, holds zero assets, and carries no outstanding liabilities. That threshold matters enormously here. If any of these dissolved entities held residual assets or had unresolved creditor claims, they would not qualify for striking off. The fact that they are being struck off suggests Alerzo has structured these vehicles to be clean — but whether that cleaning reflects genuine settlement or strategic restructuring is a question creditors in Nigeria will want answered.
Corporate restructuring experts note that dissolving bridge financing and SPV structures shortly after a primary market legal crisis is a recognised liability-isolation tactic. By severing the legal links between offshore financing arms and an embattled operating entity, a parent company reduces the surface area available to foreign creditors attempting to enforce judgments across jurisdictions. Under Singapore’s striking-off regime, creditors have a 60-day objection window after the Gazette publication — which means the window for challenging these dissolutions runs through late June 2026.
The Moniepoint Lawsuit and a ₦4.38 Billion Default
The Nigerian lawsuit, filed by Moniepoint in December 2025, tells a story of rapid deterioration. Alerzo’s board approved the ₦5 billion facility in January 2025, structured as an 18-month working capital loan with immediate-recall provisions in case of default. By November 2025 — less than a year into the tenor — Moniepoint had issued a formal demand for full repayment. The outstanding balance at that point stood at ₦4.38 billion ($2.8 million), according to court documents. Justice Daniel Osiagor granted the Mareva injunction in February 2026, directing financial institutions to freeze all accounts tied to Alerzo Limited, its founder and CEO Adewale Opaleye, three individual guarantors, and the Singapore parent entity.
The suit also reveals that Moniepoint encountered significant difficulty serving court processes to the named guarantors, who were reportedly unreachable at their registered addresses. The court authorised substituted service — an unusual step that indicates the level of evasion, or at minimum disorganisation, the claimant’s legal team encountered.
Opaleye has not conceded that Alerzo is finished. Earlier this year, when footage circulated on Nigerian social media showing rows of Alerzo-branded vehicles parked idle in a compound in Ibadan, Oyo State, he told local media the vehicles were scrapped units rather than active fleet — and that more than 400 vehicles remained operational. The company has not responded publicly to the Singapore SPV dissolutions at the time of publication.
A $20 Million Bet That the Naira Would Hold
The broader context is brutal for any startup in Alerzo’s position. As TechMoonshot reported in February, the company had already begun liquidating its delivery fleet — the motorcycles and buses that formed the physical backbone of its FMCG distribution model — months before the Singapore moves became public. That fleet was not peripheral infrastructure. It was Alerzo’s operational core.
Alerzo launched in 2018 on a thesis that had genuine logic behind it: Nigeria’s informal retail sector, composed of more than five million small shops generating hundreds of billions of naira annually, was radically inefficient because it relied on layers of middlemen between manufacturers and storefront. A digitised aggregation platform could compress that supply chain, unlock bulk-buying economics, and deliver margin to all sides. The company raised over $20 million — including a $10.5 million Series A led by Nosara Capital in 2022, with Capria Ventures, FJ Labs, SOSV, and Galaxy Digital among the backers.
What the model required, and never got, was a stable macroeconomic floor. Nigeria’s decision to unify its exchange rate regime in mid-2023 triggered a naira devaluation of more than 60% against the dollar in the following months. For an FMCG platform importing goods or purchasing inventory priced in hard currency, the cost shock was immediate and compounding. Purchasing power at the retailer level collapsed in lockstep. The result: a squeeze on both ends of the value chain, at exactly the moment the company needed its logistics costs — fuel, vehicle maintenance, driver wages — to stay manageable.
Alerzo and Its Creditor Are a Study in Contrasting Models
The ₦5 billion loan Alerzo sought in January 2025 was not expansion capital. It was triage. And as Nigeria’s fintech sector consolidates around well-capitalised platforms, the contrast with its largest creditor could not be sharper. Moniepoint — which raised a $200 million Series C across two tranches and processes over $250 billion in digital payments annually — built its dominance precisely by avoiding low-margin distribution and concentrating on high-margin merchant banking. That $200 million raise now positions Moniepoint as one of the strongest creditors in the Nigerian startup ecosystem. Alerzo is, in many ways, a cautionary mirror image.
Alerzo is not the only casualty of the post-2022 correction in Nigerian startup valuations. Mecho Autotech, which raised nearly $4.8 million, has shut down. Medsaf and Edukoya have struggled or pivoted under pressure. The B2B and logistics categories — which attracted the most venture enthusiasm during the zero-interest-rate funding boom — have proven structurally fragile when margin assumptions meet Nigerian macro reality. What remains to be seen is whether Alerzo’s dissolution of offshore financing vehicles represents the beginning of an orderly wind-down, a defensive restructuring ahead of settlement talks with Moniepoint, or a disorganised attempt to ring-fence whatever international assets remain. The 60-day creditor objection window in Singapore, and the pending substantive hearing in Lagos, will be the next indicators. Opaleye has not yet indicated whether he intends to contest the debt or negotiate a resolution.
