Blaaiz is building in Nigeria’s cross-border payments market, where personal remittance inflows reached $20.93 billion in 2024, according to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The size of these flows presents an opportunity for companies building the infrastructure that powers them.

Day 1: Too many hats and the Telegram bot

On his first day as a founder, Ayodele was stepping into the unknown. Leaving Accenture meant walking away from a stable consulting career into uncertainty. There was no roadmap or assurance that anyone would use what he and Oni were about to build.

“It was exciting to try out something that I had not done before,” he said. “But I was also anxious. We had no clear path as to what we were going to do or how this was going to turn out, but we decided to give it a shot.”

With just two people building the company, job titles became blurred. Ayodele said that at the beginning, he was the CEO, but he was also the product manager, business analyst, compliance lead, and the person speaking to regulators about licences.

“There were no clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), no structure,” he said. “Anything that came up, we just got it done.”

The first iteration of Blaaiz was a Telegram chatbot. Customers looking to send money would message the bot, choose from a list of options, receive a payment link, and continue the transaction through a series of prompts.

To find those first customers, Ayodele told TechCabal that he leaned on his network and posted the Telegram link on his WhatsApp status almost every day, asking friends to try the product and inform him of what was broken.

“At that point, it was not about making money; it was about getting people to trust what I was building,” he said. That trust eventually gave Blaaiz enough momentum to launch a standalone mobile app in early 2024.

Day 500: The app was not the answer

By early 2024, Blaaiz had outgrown the Telegram bot. Ayodele explained that after months of navigating regulatory requirements, Blaaiz launched as a standalone mobile app, focused on retail cross-border payments. Initially, Blaaiz supported the Canada-Nigeria payment corridor before expanding to Europe and the UK through partnerships with Tier 1 banks, whose names Ayodele declined to disclose.

However, the launch of the new app only introduced a new obsession for Ayodele. 

“There was a little bit of obsession with how many downloads we had in a day and where they were from,” he said. “At some point, I knew all our customers by their first names.”

That closeness gave him an unfiltered view of what customers genuinely wanted. Ayodele said he observed that customers wanted more payment corridors and more supported currencies. Blaaiz could satisfy some of those requests, but some required infrastructure that the startup did not have access to.

Curious to discover if the problem was unique to Blaaiz, Ayodele said he began studying about 10 competing remittance apps, which he did not disclose. He stated that many platforms supported a handful of payment corridors, while promising more countries and services labelled as coming soon. He realised that the bottleneck was the underlying infrastructure.

“It became obvious that the rails the customers wanted, we couldn’t provide them in the way they wanted them,” he said. “It began to dawn on us that it was not a Blaaiz-specific problem.”

Ayodele concluded that the real opportunity lay in building the infrastructure that would allow remittance apps, fintechs, and payment companies to expand into new markets without doing the heavy lifting themselves.

By late 2024, Blaaiz began repositioning itself from an app that helped consumers move money to a payments infrastructure company that integrated with banks and payment rails to enable financial institutions to offer cross-border payments to their customers.

“There was a bit of a conflict in our messaging, but we knew what we wanted, and then we just stayed true to our new value proposition,” Ayodele said.

In his telling, that transition was facilitated by the heavy investment the team put in while building the consumer app. He added that moving from a consumer-facing app to selling infrastructure came with challenges, including more exhaustive due diligence processes and strengthening its compliance position across jurisdictions to secure banking partnerships and users.

Day 1000: Playing the long game

By 2025, the challenges that came with Blaaiz’s pivot were beginning to pay off. Blaaiz had become profitable, and to Ayodele, that was a signal that the new strategy was working, and that meant it was time to go further.

“I remember telling my staff that this is the time we needed to start to make very consequential moves to become truly bankable and go for the higher reward,” he said.

Unlike the early days when he wore many hats, Ayodele’s attention was now fixed on establishing partnerships with institutions he did not disclose and securing licences in Blaaiz’s operational markets. Today, Blaaiz holds an International Money Transfer Operator (IMTO) licence in Nigeria, a money services business (MSB) licence and payment service provider (PSP) registration in Canada, among others, while actively pursuing a money transmitter licence (MTL) across states in the United States.

When Blaaiz entered the remittance market in 2023, it was entering a space already occupied by players such as Lemfi, Nala, and Grey. However, as Ayodele said, he studied both customer behaviour and rival products, and he was convinced that the bigger opportunity lay in building the infrastructure they all depended on. Blaaiz’s transition to an infrastructure company now puts it in competition with providers like Fincra, Thunes, and Onafriq.

Looking ahead, Ayodele said Blaaiz is staying true to the direction it chose in 2024, and that the startup is preparing for wherever the future of money leads. He stopped short of making firm predictions, but spoke of positioning the company for the full range of what moving money could look like, including fiat, settlement networks, and digital assets.

“We’re not pivoting into anything that we haven’t already done,” he said. It’s infrastructure-led in such a way that it provides for however the future of money evolves to become.”

The retail app that started Blaaiz’s journey still exists. With roughly 50,000 users, according to Ayodele, the app has taken on a second life as the company’s internal testing ground.  He noted that it is where new features are built, refined, and validated before being rolled out through Blaaiz’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and infrastructure products. 

A thousand days after setting out to build a better remittance app, Ayodele and Oni ended up building the infrastructure beneath it.

True scale demands moving beyond surface-level integrations to robust execution. We’ve filtered the noise out of Moonshot 2026, optimising the conference strictly for high-calibre connections between startup founders, global financial operators, enterprise leaders and individuals rewiring Africa’s technical frameworks.
Get 20% off Early Bird tickets for a limited time.