Overview
Cloud9 is a digital bank for African entrepreneurs doing business globally. Instant cross-border payments, multi-currency accounts, FX, global cards, credit lines, interest-bearing savings, investments, insurance, and bill payments.
Ask: Intros to African merchants with cross-border transactions. Reach me through [email protected], @teshmbaabu on Telegram, or @teshmbaabu on X.
The problem
Kenyan businesses import $20bn a year, mostly from China, Dubai and India, and mostly through small merchants rather than corporates. Their options are bad. Banks take two weeks to open an account and days per wire, at FX spreads nobody discloses upfront. Informal agents are faster but expensive, with no record and no recourse. Mobile money runs daily commerce but stops at the border, so shillings become dollars or yuan through a middleman.
Our solution
Cloud9 is a multi-currency account on your phone, built on stablecoin rails. Onboarding takes minutes instead of two weeks, and payments settle in minutes instead of days, at a rate shown before you send. Every payment leaves a record, so merchants get the speed of an agent with the receipts and recourse of a bank, and build a history they can use. Users top up from mobile money, hold dollars or yuan, pay suppliers or receive from clients abroad, and cash out to mobile money again.
Hold any currency
Keep shillings, dollars, euros, pounds and yuan in one account, and convert whenever rates suit you. Get your own virtual account to receive payments from customers abroad.
Pay suppliers abroad
Send dollars, yuan or euros to suppliers in 100+ countries, settled in minutes over stablecoin rails. You see the exchange rate before you pay, with no hidden spread.
Pay local vendors
Move money between Cloud9 and mobile money, so you can pay local staff and vendors the same day. Approve team payments and bulk payouts with built-in maker-checker controls.
Traction
320k
Total Payment Volume
25,000
Accounts Opened
15%
WoW TPV Growth
0
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Vision
Kenya already skipped the bank branch once. Mobile money became how the country pays for almost everything, but only within its borders. The same gap holds across a continent of 1.4 billion people, the world's youngest, spending $2 trillion a year.
Nubank proved one digital bank could serve 100 million people traditional banks ignored. If Cloud9 works, a merchant in Nairobi pays a supplier in Guangzhou as easily as a vendor down the street, a freelancer in Lagos gets paid from London in minutes, and every African entrepreneur holds dollars as easily as shillings. Where a business is based should never limit who it can buy from or sell to.
Team
Tesh Mbaabu (Founder & CEO): Co-founded MarketForce and led it to a $40M Series A, scaling BNPL and a B2B inventory marketplace to 270,000 African retailers, now a Stanford GSB case study. Before that he sold his first company, a travel-tech startup, to HotelOnline. Forbes Africa 30 Under 30. After years building for African merchants, he has watched them outgrow local payment rails the moment they trade across borders.
