Venture

Yuki

The company I founded to give African fintechs wallet-as-a-service and digital-asset rails for African fintechs, delivered as APIs, pre-built workflows and compliance tooling.

Founder · CEO · Product lead

What it is

“Composable MPC wallet-as-service infrastructure for African financial businesses and developers.” Celo, introducing the Celo Camp Batch 7 teams

Yuki is a company of its own. It grew out of the infrastructure built at ComiBlock and made digital assets usable for African fintechs that had customers but no crypto infrastructure: instead of building custody, wallets and settlement themselves, they called an API.

How it works

Wallets as a service. The API generates non-custodial wallets at scale, signs transactions and monitors balances in real time.
No nodes to run. Transactions are submitted on-chain by Yuki, with web notifications back to the customer.
Rails underneath. Public repositories cover a fiat on/off-ramp settlement network, stablecoin swaps and a DEX integration library.

Traction

Aladdin Digital. In May 2023 Yuki partnered with the neobank Aladdin Digital to bring digital assets to Aladdin's more than 75,000 users.
Scale. The API served more than 20,000 requests a day across fintech partners.
Celo Camp, twice. Yuki went through Celo Camp in two back-to-back batches, 7 and 8, won the DeFi startup award at the Celo Camp Innovation Awards in 2023, and later returned as a mentor organisation.
Blockchain Founders Group. In October 2023 Yuki was accepted into the Blockchain Founders Group's Adrenaline programme.
Stellar. Yuki was active in the Stellar ecosystem, alongside the Stellar Foundation grant ComiBlock received.

Why it mattered

As I said at the time, crypto in Africa can't succeed without the incumbent fintechs adopting it. Yuki was built to make that adoption an integration rather than a rebuild.

At a glance

Role: Founder · CEO · Product lead
Company: Yuki

Highlights

Yuki's wallet-as-a-service API generates non-custodial wallets at scale, signs transactions, and monitors balances in real time, with transactions submitted on-chain so customers run no node infrastructure.
In May 2023 Yuki partnered with the neobank Aladdin Digital to bring digital assets to Aladdin's users; Aladdin had more than 75,000 users.
Yuki won the DeFi startup award at the Celo Camp Innovation Awards.
Yuki later joined Celo Camp as a mentor organisation for a 2024 cohort.
Yuki's public repositories cover a stablecoin swap, a fiat on/off-ramp settlement network and a DEX integration library.

Links

Systems from Yuki

System

Wallet-as-a-service for African fintechs

One API that gives any fintech wallets, stablecoins, on/off ramps and KYC for its customers, normalising a patchwork of regional providers behind a single contract. 20,000+ requests a day.

WalletsStablecoinsAPIs

System

Custody: from encrypted keys to MPC and smart accounts

How Yuki's wallet custody evolved: envelope-encrypted keys to ship fast, then a composable V2 built around threshold signing and on-chain smart-contract wallets.

CustodyMPCWallets

System

A settlement network for fiat ramps

Large ramp orders broadcast to many liquidity providers, split into fillable pieces and settled through escrow, so African Web3 businesses can move volumes no single provider can carry.

SettlementLiquidityOn/off ramps

System

Stablecoin swaps and DEX pricing

Local-currency stablecoin swaps inside a mobile wallet, and an event-driven pricing library that quotes across dozens of exchanges from memory instead of hammering nodes.

DeFiStablecoinsPricing