Nomba has secured a $3 million debt facility from CardinalStone Finance Company Limited to expand its cross-border payments operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Lagos-headquartered fintech will use the facility to boost its US dollar liquidity and settle payments through banking relationships in Hong Kong and Singapore, positioning its DRC unit as a base for trade settlement between Central Africa and Asia.
Why Nomba Is Betting on the DRC-Asia Corridor
The facility is small next to Nomba’s earlier raises, but it signals something more specific than a routine liquidity top-up. Trade between China and the DRC reached $26.7 billion in 2025, with China importing $21.6 billion in goods and exporting $5.1 billion back, a corridor that has outgrown the payment rails currently built to serve it. Nomba already processes more than $480 million a month in cross-border payments across its DRC operations and its Canadian-licensed money service business, and it is targeting $1 billion in monthly cross-border volume as it builds out.
That ambition comes with a number attached. Nomba says it will need another $20 million to $50 million in debt, raised in stages, to fund the next phase of expansion into new corridors and markets, including planned moves into Zambia and Uganda. The company frames itself as already profitable across both its DRC and Nigerian operations, a claim that matters more than usual in the current funding climate, where African fintech has continued attracting capital even as investors demand tighter proof of unit economics before writing bigger checks.
Choosing debt over equity for this stage is itself a signal. Debt financing avoids further diluting existing shareholders and can be cheaper for a company with predictable cash flows, but it also means Nomba is leaning on its balance sheet to fund market entry in the DRC, a country whose currency volatility and regulatory patchwork have tripped up payment companies before. If transaction volume in the corridor grows more slowly than projected, debt-funded expansion carries less room for error than an equity cushion would.
A Long Way From Kudi
Nomba’s evolution has been steady rather than flashy. The company launched in 2016 as Kudi, a chatbot built to handle financial requests over social apps, before rebranding to Nomba in 2022 under co-founders Yinka Adewale and Pelumi Aboluwarin. It has since built out point-of-sale terminals, banking tools, and business management software, growing into a platform that Tracxn puts at $42.7 million in total funding across six rounds, including a $5 million Series A and a $30 million pre-Series B round in 2023 led by Base10 Partners, with Helios Digital Ventures, Shopify, Partech, and Khosla Ventures also participating.
The company’s push into banking partnerships has deepened alongside its fundraising. A collaboration with Globus Bank had processed ₦1 trillion in transactions by October 2025 and was tracking toward ₦10 trillion within twelve months, and by January 2026, virtual accounts made up 75 percent of Nomba’s business payment transactions, according to Nairametrics reporting. That shift toward virtual accounts and bank partnerships suggests Nomba is positioning itself as payments infrastructure for other institutions, not just a merchant-facing app, a strategy that echoes how Moniepoint scaled past pure point-of-sale acquiring into broader business banking on its way to unicorn status.
The open question is competitive crowding. Nomba is not the only African fintech chasing cross-border rails into Asia, and its DRC bet concentrates growth expectations in a single, still-developing corridor rather than spreading risk across several established markets. If the China-DRC trade relationship cools, or if a competitor locks up banking relationships in Hong Kong and Singapore first, Nomba’s timeline to $1 billion in monthly cross-border volume could slip well past the “coming months” framing the company is using now. For a sector where cross-border payment infrastructure has become one of the most contested growth bets on the continent, execution speed in the DRC will likely decide whether this debt round looks prescient or premature a year from now.
