Kulipa - The Card Layer Fintechs Need But Cannot Build Themselves
Fintechs Can Hold Stablecoins. Spending Them at a Merchant is a Different Problem
Moving dollars onchain is easy now. Using those balances at a merchant still requires someone to handle authorization, manage settlement, run offramps, and maintain compliance across jurisdictions. Most fintechs and wallets do not want to become card issuers. Kulipa sells the infrastructure that means they do not have to.
Kulipa raised a $6.2M seed round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx, after launching in 2025 with 120K cards issued and 20 signed customers.
In this edition, we look at what Kulipa is building, why this layer is still open, and what the Flutterwave relationship signals about where this category is heading.
What Kulipa Is
Kulipa is B2B payment infrastructure. It does not issue cards to consumers directly. It gives fintechs and wallets the back-end they need to issue their own stablecoin-funded card products: scheme relationships, real-time authorization, settlement, offramps, and a compliance layer covering KYC, KYB, and AML in one stack.
Cards issued through the platform work anywhere major card networks are accepted, including ATM withdrawals, and connect to either self-custodial or custodial wallets. Zero prefunding required, 100+ countries covered.
Kulipa’s customers include Flutterwave, Solflare, nSave, and Ready, with 70% month-on-month transaction volume growth. Those figures are company and investor-reported.
Why This Layer Is Still Open
Merchant-level stablecoin acceptance is still limited, which means cards remain the conversion layer between onchain balances and everyday spend, and every card transaction needs a regulated entity processing it in the middle.
Kulipa is grouped in the same category as Rain, Nium, Reap, and Wirex as the infrastructure enabling other businesses to issue stablecoin cards. Within that group, Kulipa’s positioning is specifically fintechs and wallets pursuing neobank-style products, ie. brands that want to offer card products under their own name without becoming card issuers themselves.
Nium and Rain have been in market longer and have deeper scheme relationships. And if merchant stablecoin acceptance broadens significantly, the card wrapper use case shrinks. The operational problem Kulipa solves exists regardless of either constraint, because the scheme connectivity and compliance gap is a present reality, not a future one.
The Flutterwave Customer
Flutterwave is a cross-border payments company serving African markets, where stablecoin settlement avoids the correspondent banking cut on every transaction. Attaching a card layer to that rail extends the use case from B2B transfers into retail spend, covering far more transaction volume than a crypto-native wallet use case would.
If Kulipa's customer base skews toward cross-border fintechs with that cost profile, the growth story runs on correspondent banking displacement rather than stablecoin adoption. The cost advantage on cross-border transfers persists as long as correspondent banks keep charging for it; it does not depend on whether crypto retail grows.
Stablecoin adoption depends on retail behavior that is still forming. The Flourish and 1kx co-lead brings both emerging markets fintech networks and crypto-native distribution into the same cap table.
How the next cohort of signed customers breaks down between those two profiles, cross-border infrastructure plays vs. crypto-native wallet products, is what determines whether this is a durable displacement play.
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