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.
The idea for Mainstack came from a personal frustration at Microsoft: no format existed to tell a complex professional story better than a resume. An early version drew 3,000 sign-ups in a week, almost entirely from freelancers and creators wanting to showcase their work and get paid for it. Ayobami left Meta to build Mainstack full time after receiving simultaneous offers from three Techstars programs.
Active in:
Nigeria, United Kingdom, United States
