Technology
Stripe Acquires Nigeria’s Paystack for $200m
By Adedapo Adesanya
American financial service platform, Stripe, has acquired Paystack, one of Nigeria’s leading payment service providers.
Paystack provides a quick way to integrate payments services into an online or offline transaction by way of an application programming interface.
According to reports, the arrangement will see Paystack continue its operations independently with its large customer base which includes small businesses, larger corporates, fintechs, educational institutions, and online betting companies.
Although not all terms of the deal were made public, people privy with the discussions noted that it is worth over $200 million. This makes it the biggest startup acquisition out of Nigeria.
This will help expand the company’s footprint around the world and also set it up for a possible IPO in the future.
Speaking in an interview with Tech Crunch, Mr Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and CEO, said it was an enormous opportunity considering the future prospects of online commerce.
“In absolute numbers, Africa may be smaller right now than other regions, but online commerce will grow about 30 per cent every year. And even with wider global declines, online shoppers are growing twice as fast.
“Stripe thinks on a longer time horizon than others because we are an infrastructure company. We are thinking of what the world will look like in 2040-2050,” he said.
On the part of Paystack, the deal will give the company an ability to build out further in Nigeria and expand to other markets, disclosed its CEO, Mr Shola Akinlade, in an interview.
“Paystack was not for sale when Stripe approached us. For us, it’s about the mission. I’m driven by the mission to accelerate payments on the continent, and I am convinced that Stripe will help us get there faster. It is a very natural move,” Mr Akinlade stated.
Stripe has made a number of investments into startups building technology or businesses in areas, including backing investment in universal checkout service, Fast, and backing the Philippines-based payment platform, PayMongo.
Both companies have a history with Stripe leading an $8 million funding round for Paystack, with others participating including Visa and Tencent in 2018.
Mr Collison said that while acquiring Paystack after investing in it was a big move for the company, people also shouldn’t read too much into it in terms of Stripe’s bigger acquisition policy.
“When we invest in startups, we’re not trying to tie them up with complicated strategic investments. We try to understand the broader ecosystem, and keep our eyes pointed outwards and see where we can help.”
This may mean that it has no plans to acquire other regional companies or other operations simply to expand Stripe’s footprint but how well it operates as in the case of Paystack.
“A lot of companies have been, let’s say, heavily influenced by Stripe but with Paystack, clearly they’ve put a lot of original thinking into how to do things better. There are some details of Stripe that we consider mistakes, but we can see that Paystack gets it, it’s clear from the site and from the product sensibilities, and that has nothing to do with them being in Africa or African.”
Business Post gathered that Stripe and Paystack postponed the original announcement in part because of the current situation of demonstrations against police brutality in Nigeria.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the players in the Nigerian gaming industry, Secure Electronic Technology (SET) Plc, has appointed Ms Leticia Otomewo as its acting secretary.
This followed the expiration of the company’s service contract with the former occupier of the seat, Ms Irene Attoe, on January 31, 2026.
A statement to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday said Ms Otomewo would remain the organisation’s scribe in an acting capacity, pending the ratification and appointment of a substantive company secretary at the next board meeting.
She was described in the notice signed by the Managing Director of the firm, Mr Oyeyemi Olusoji, as “a results-driven executive with 22 years of experience in driving business growth, leading high-performing teams, and delivering innovative solutions.”
The acting secretary is also said to be “a collaborative leader with a passion for mentoring and developing talent.”
“The company assures the investing public that all Company Secretariat responsibilities and regulatory obligations will continue to be discharged in full compliance with the Companies and Allied Matters Act, applicable regulations, and the Nigerian Exchange Limited Listing Rules,” the disclosure assured.
Meanwhile, the board thanked Ms Attoe “for professionalism and contributions to the Company during the period of her engagement and wishes her well in her future endeavours.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
The Russian government on Thursday confirmed it has blocked the WhatsApp messaging service, as it moves to further control information flow in the country.
It urged Russians to use a new state-backed platform called Max instead of the Meta-owned service.
WhatsApp issued a statement earlier saying Russia had attempted to “fully block” its messaging service in the country to force people toward Max, which it described as a “surveillance app.”
“Today the Russian government attempted to fully block WhatsApp in an effort to drive people to a state-owned surveillance app,” WhatsApp posted on social media platform X.
“Trying to isolate over 100 million users from private and secure communication is a backwards step and can only lead to less safety for people in Russia,” it said, adding: “We continue to do everything we can to keep users connected.”
Russia’s latest move against social media platforms and messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram comes amid a wider attempt to drive users toward domestic and more easily controlled and monitored services, such as Max.
Russia’s telecoms watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has accused messaging apps Telegram and WhatsApp of failing to comply with Russian legislation requiring companies to store Russian users’ data inside the country, and of failing to introduce measures to stop their platforms from being used for allegedly criminal or terrorist purposes.
It has used this as a basis for slowing down or blocking their operations, with restrictions coming into force since last year.
For Telegram, it may be next, but so far the Russian government has been admittedly slowing down its operations “due to the fact that the company isn’t complying with the requirements of Russian legislation.”
The chat service, founded by Russian developers but headquartered in Dubai, has been a principal target for Roskomnadzor’s scrutiny and increasing restrictions, with users reporting sluggish performance on the app since January.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian startup, Decide, has emerged as the fourth most accurate Artificial Intelligence (AI) agent for spreadsheet tasks globally, according to results from SpreadsheetBench, a widely referenced benchmark for evaluating AI performance on real-world spreadsheet problems.
According to the founder, Mr Abiodun Adetona, the ranking places Decide alongside well-funded global AI startups, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
Mr Adetona, an ex-Flutterwave developer, also revealed that Decide now has over 3,000 users, including some who are paying customers, a signal to the ability of the startup to scale in the near future.
SpreadsheetBench is a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to push Large Language Models (LLMs) to their limits in understanding and manipulating spreadsheet data. While many benchmarks focus on simple table QA, SpreadsheetBench treats a spreadsheet as a complex ecosystem involving spatial layouts, formulas, and multi-step reasoning. So far, only three agents rank higher than Decide, namely Nobie Agent, Shortcut.ai, and Qingqiu Agent.
Mr Adetona said SpreadsheetBench measures how well AI agents can handle practical spreadsheet tasks such as writing formulas, cleaning messy data, working across multiple sheets, and reasoning through complex Excel workflows. Decide recorded an 82.5% accuracy score, solving 330 out of 400 verified tasks.
“The result reflects sustained investment in applied research, product iteration, and learning from real-world spreadsheet workloads across a wide range of use cases,” Mr Adetona told Business Post.
For Mr Adetona, who built Decide out of frustration with how much time professionals spend manually cleaning data, debugging formulas, and moving between sheets, “This milestone highlights how focused engineering and domain-specific AI development can deliver frontier-level performance outside of large research organisations. By concentrating on practical business data problems and building systems grounded in real user environments, we believe smaller teams can contribute meaningfully to advancing applied AI.”
“For Decide, this is a foundation for continued progress in intelligent spreadsheet and analytics automation,” he added.
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