- Timon, the stablecoin-powered travel payments company, is doubling down on Kenya after crossing 100,000 users and securing investment from Alliance.
Timon, the stablecoin-powered travel payments platform helping Africans spend, save and move money across borders, is deepening its presence in Kenya as it crosses 100,000 users.
The expansion builds on momentum from Timon’s recent acceptance into Alliance and investment from the accelerator, widely regarded as one of the world’s most selective and rigorous programmes for crypto startups.
Timon’s selection places it among a small group of founders chosen for each cohort and serves as a strong endorsement of both the company’s vision and the growing demand for borderless financial products built for globally mobile Africans.
Founded by Tomi Ayorinde and Chizaram Ucheaga, Timon was built to solve a problem long overlooked in African fintech.
While most of the continent’s payment innovation has focused on getting money into Africa through remittances, Timon was built for the opposite challenge: helping a new generation of globally earning African professionals spend, preserve, and move their wealth, without losing value to currency devaluation or running into the payment failures that plague international travel.
The idea came from the founders’ own experiences. Despite spending years building financial products across Africa, the co-founders repeatedly found themselves stranded abroad due to declined cards, fragmented payment systems, and cumbersome foreign exchange processes.
“We’ve spent the last decade solving how money comes into Africa,” said Ayorinde. “We think the next major opportunity is helping Africans take their money with them wherever they go. There is now a generation of Africans earning globally, preserving value in stablecoins and living increasingly international lives.”
Launched in September 2024, Timon has since evolved from a card-first travel product into what the founders call a financial passport for Africans. At its core, the product combines payments, travel, and financial services into a single platform designed for globally mobile Africans.
Users can fund their wallets using local currencies, US dollar accounts, or stablecoins to access virtual and physical payment cards, cross-border transfers, local payouts, and global eSIMS. Physical cards are available for pickup at airports and can be delivered to users within the country in 24 to 48 hours.
The platform also supports local payment rails in multiple markets, allowing users to pay like locals while travelling through cards, mobile money, or other regional payment methods.
Customers across 16 African countries can now fund and use Timon, with Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa emerging as its largest markets.
Stablecoins, interestingly, were never part of the original roadmap. The feature was introduced in response to customer demand and quickly became one of the company’s biggest growth drivers, with nearly 70% of funding activity now flowing through stablecoins.
For Alliance, Timon sits at the intersection of several powerful shifts: the rise of stablecoins as consumer financial infrastructure, growing global mobility among African professionals and increasing demand for cross-border financial products that sit outside traditional banking systems.
“We’re building for where financial services are going, not where they’ve been,” said Ucheaga. “Alliance understood that immediately. Beyond capital, they’ve given us access to operators, partnerships and a network that can dramatically accelerate our growth.”
Why Kenya?
Although Timon now serves users across 16 African markets, the company says its expansion strategy is driven less by geography and more by demand.
“We don’t expand because the market looks attractive on paper,” said Ayorinde. “We expand because customers are already there.”
Kenya emerged as one of Timon’s fastest-growing markets after users began discovering the platform through referrals and word of mouth. It now sits alongside Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa as one of the company’s four priority markets, while the team continues to see growing demand across East and Francophone Africa.
What’s next?
The Alliance backing will support Timon’s next phase of growth, with the company doubling down on product development, market expansion, customer acquisition and further investment in its stablecoin infrastructure.
The company also plans to launch additional travel-focused products, including travel-planning tools, insurance offerings, and expanded global payment capabilities. But the founders insist they are building something much bigger than a travel card.
“We often describe Timon as the Revolut for African travellers,” said Ucheaga. “But what we’re really building is a financial passport.”
“In the future,” Ayorinde added, “people will travel with two passports: their national passport and their financial passport. We want Timon to become that financial passport.”
It’s a vision shaped by years of building financial products across the continent. Before Timon, Ayorinde, a Y Combinator-backed entrepreneur, founded and exited PayForce, a merchant and agency banking platform focused on expanding access to financial services across Africa.
Ucheaga previously founded Clymb Technologies, which sought to improve financial inclusion for more than 350 million unbanked adults through agent banking and financial infrastructure products.
