ATLANTA (July 1) Hypepotamus – Raise venture capital in USD. Then start building globally. That is a playbook international tech founders often follow, says Atlanta-based entrepreneur Joshua Afolabi (seen in featured photo above). But the pain starts the minute that money hits their account.
“Startups operating across Africa and Latin America often have to stitch together multiple financial tools just to operate globally,” said Afolabi, something that they need to do to manage treasury, payroll, vendor payments, and day-to-day operations across multiple currencies and regions.
It was a FinTech problem that Afolabi saw first-hand, and is now working to fix with his second startup, Bullion. The platform is building modern financial infrastructure for startups. What that means in practice is that founders can use the Bullion platform to open business accounts, corporate cards, and manage vendor payments in each global market, without having to deal with different currencies and different accounts. This also allows founders to hold funds in their preferred currencies, receive revenue, manage international spending, and support teams and vendors across borders.
Building FinTech Across Borders
Bullion’s cross-border capabilities are made possible through a partnership with the FinTech giant Stripe. Using Stripe Treasury and Stripe Issuing, Bullion enables startups to access USD financial accounts, issue physical and virtual cards, manage company spending, and move funds across borders through a unified platform. Bullion also uses modern payment infrastructure, including stablecoin rails behind the scenes, to improve settlement speed and reduce friction for international transactions, according to a press release.
“With Stripe powering key parts of the US and UK financial infrastructure layer, Bullion is building a more unified financial experience that helps founders hold, manage, and operate across currencies and borders from a single platform,” Afolabi added.
For Bullion, startups scaling globally don’t just need a place to hold and move money, they need to understand it in real time to make faster decisions. The platform also surfaces runway, spending patterns, treasury activity, and cross-border cash flow in real time, turning what’s usually a scattered, after-the-fact reconciliation process into something founders can act on as it happens.
Meet The Founder
This is Afolabi’s second startup. Hypepotamus previously interviewed Afolabi for his startup 2ggo, a same-day delivery logistics startup. Before that he worked at healthcare IT. The startup won the Audience Choice Award at the 20th Startup Runway competition in Atlanta in 2023.
Now Afolabi is joining Atlanta’s FinTech startup scene to solve an international problem.
The reality is that business accounts can make or break an international startup. In 2024, the US-based Mercury, an online business banking platform, announced it would close the accounts of founders in 13 African countries, sending shockwaves across the continent’s tech ecosystem.
