Flutterwave raised a Series E at a $3.25B valuation after a strategic Ripple investment, as both firms integrate RLUSD stablecoin rails for Africa.
Flutterwave said it has closed a Series E round at a $3.25 billion valuation, following a strategic investment from Ripple. Flutterwave declined to disclose the investment amount.
On a call, CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola said Ripple made an “actual cash investment” and is now an equity shareholder. The deal is tied to product integration, not just capital.
Flutterwave and Ripple plan to plug RLUSD into Flutterwave’s payment rails. A stablecoin is a crypto token designed to track a real currency, usually the US dollar, like a digital dollar balance. The integration is expected to let merchants and consumers send, hold, and convert value using stablecoins inside Flutterwave’s stack.
Agboola said Flutterwave chose Ripple for three reasons: infrastructure, regulatory credibility, and cheaper and faster cross-border settlement. Ripple’s RLUSD and the XRP Ledger are expected to support settlement, meaning the “final transfer” step that completes a cross-border payment.
For Flutterwave, stablecoin settlement can reduce reliance on slow correspondent banking, which is the chain of intermediary banks that often adds time and fees to international transfers. If the RLUSD integration works at scale, it could help Flutterwave price cross-border payments more competitively and improve reliability for merchants that collect in one currency and pay suppliers in another.
For Ripple, the deal is a clearer route into Africa’s dollar-denominated payments market, where demand is growing across import, remittances, and online trade. Mastercard has projected Africa’s digital payments economy could reach $1.5 trillion by 2030.
The bigger signal is that more African fintech infrastructure players are treating stablecoins as a back-end rail, not just a trading product. That could raise new questions for regulators on consumer protection, liquidity, and how stablecoin balances are supervised across markets.
Primary Source: Techcabal
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