Bankly finds a new home, gets acquired by investment firm, C-One Ventures
In a continent where financial inclusion remains a jigsaw with missing pieces, startups like Bankly have long played the patient artists, sketching access to banking one community at a time. Now, the startup’s journey enters a new chapter: Bankly has been acquired by C-One Ventures, a Nigerian-based venture firm focused on emerging markets.
The news, confirmed earlier today by Tomilola Majekodunmi, Bankly`s Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer, signals a deepening interest in the financial infrastructure of Africa’s informal economies — the vast, bustling networks of cash-based transactions that formal banking has long struggled to reach. Bankly, founded by Tomilola Adejana and Fredrick Adams in 2019, was born precisely for this terrain. Where banks saw risk, Bankly saw opportunity. Where regulators saw chaos, Bankly saw a living, breathing economy waiting for dignity.
Through a network of offline agents and digital wallets, Bankly offered individuals a way to digitise cash safely, securely, and gradually. In places where “banking” still means hiding savings under mattresses or travelling miles to the nearest branch, Bankly promised a future you could touch.
That future has now caught the attention of C-One, a venture firm whose very thesis rests on reimagining capital access for underserved populations. The details of Bankly`s acquisition amount remain undisclosed, but insiders familiar with the deal say it reflects a broader ambition: to take Bankly’s vision of cash-to-digital transitions and scale it across wider, catering to both individuals and small businesses across different strata of Nigeria’s financial landscape, while also extending to tougher terrains beyond Nigeria. Reliable sources confirm that this transition process is already in play, where a structural reorganisation will align newly-acquired Bankly with its new parent company`s business goals. Bankly`s acquisition by C-One includes its licenses, proprietary tech, and team, all of which will be integrated into C-One’s growing fintech ecosystem.
For the average Nigerian SME owner — the market woman in Ogun State, the barber in Ibadan, the roadside mechanic in Enugu — the acquisition may feel distant. But it sets the stage for a quieter revolution, one where formal financial identity no longer belongs to the privileged few but to every trader, farmer, and hustler who keeps the informal economy alive.
Bankly’s rise was never meteoric; it was deliberate. When the startup secured $2 million in seed funding back in 2021, it did so against a backdrop of fintechs racing toward glittering valuations and press headlines. Bankly, however, stayed mostly under the radar, perfecting its agent network, tuning its infrastructure, and building the slow trust required when asking people to hand over their life savings to a screen. Speaking on Bankly`s acquisition on her LinkedIn page, the CEO, Majekodunmi,said,
With just $1.7M in equity, we built two licensed companies (a payment company and a microfinance bank) grew revenues to $5M (at funding exchange rates), onboarded over 50,000 agents (17,000 equipped with our own POS terminals), served over 5 million people annually through these channels, banked over 250,000 unique users, and processed over $1.2 billion annually— all with a lean, brilliant team of just 60 people. From 2019 to 2025, it has been a journey of building, stretching, learning, and becoming…one I would never trade. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to partner with the best in the industry, work alongside talented people, forge lifelong connections, and sometimes step on toes for a vision bigger than myself.
Trust, after all, is the real currency in African finance. Apps can be built overnight, but trust is earned in human years. And Bankly understood this better than most. Hence, Bankly`s acquisition by C-One Ventures will not dismantle this ethos. Instead, sources close to the companies suggest that Bankly’s founding team will continue to lead operations locally while plugging into C-One’s broader vision for emerging market fintech.
Think of it less as a takeover, and more as a magnifying glass — intensifying what Bankly has built rather than rewriting it.
In many ways, Bankly`s acquisition also reflects a global pivot. Investors who once chased Silicon Valley-style blitz-scaling are recalibrating. They are recognising that real economic impact often happens in the small, stubborn corners of the world — the places where digitising a single naira matters more than securing the next $100 million funding round.
Bankly’s journey is not just a business story. It is a human one. It is the story of a country where cash, despite fintech noise, still reigns supreme. Bankly`s acquisition is the story of informal traders who trust human hands more than screens and the story of a generation of entrepreneurs who didn’t wait for change but decided to stitch it together themselves, painstakingly, one agent at a time.
What C-One Ventures is betting on is not just Bankly’s agent network or its digital wallet platform. They are betting on the fact that if you can win trust at the grassroots, you can win the future of African finance. They are betting that real financial inclusion starts not with buzzwords, but with the quiet dignity of a man or woman seeing their first digital balance tick upward after a lifetime of cash only.
As the dust settles, the real work begins. Integrating systems. Expanding infrastructure. Deepening local partnerships. Fortifying security protocols. In a market where one misstep can unravel years of trust-building, Bankly and C-One have no choice but to walk forward with both ambition and caution. Still, it`s a bet worth making. In a world obsessed with unicorns and exponential growth charts, there’s something deeply refreshing about a story where patience, perseverance, and people-first technology finally get their spotlight.
Bankly`s acquisition may have occurred at a good time, and its future may now rest in the hands of a new owner. But the mission remains the same: bringing the margins into the centre. Digitising hope. One naira at a time.
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