Creative Economy | Nigeria
The operating system for business minded creators
What they do:
Mainstack is a creator commerce and payments platform that lets African creators sell digital products, courses, and services to a global audience and actually get paid for it. Creators build a storefront, list their offerings, and accept payment in USD or GBP from fans anywhere in the world; Mainstack handles the compliance and cross-border disbursement, converting proceeds into naira (or holding them in USD) through its own MSB-licensed infrastructure. A subscription tier is currently rolling out, moving the platform from pure transaction fees toward recurring revenue.
Why we Invested:
Mainstack solves a payment problem that has quietly cost African creators real money for years. Stripe doesn't operate in Nigeria. PayPal restricts most African accounts. A creator building a genuine global following still can't reliably get paid by their own fans.
Mainstack built the compliant infrastructure, holding hard-won money services licences that take years to replicate, to close that gap end to end: storefront, checkout, and cross-border disbursement in one platform. With Nigeria home to one of the continent's most active creator communities and one of the world's largest diasporas, we saw a founder who had lived this exact problem building the rails to solve it at scale, with revenue already growing 14-fold in three years on almost entirely organic, community-led growth.
The Founder:
Ayobami Oyaleke is Co-Founder and CEO of Mainstack. He began his career in 2011 as a software engineer in Nigeria, building an internship-aggregation platform that grew to serve over 70,000 users while he was still in university. He later completed a second degree in finance in the UK, then built a corporate career in the US across the United Nations, Microsoft's Office 365 team, and Meta.
Active in:
Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States
