Cleva

USD Banking Built for Africa

For millions of African freelancers and businesses operating in a global economy, getting paid in dollars has always come with an invisible tax: volatile local currencies, unreliable payment rails, and the constant friction of converting international earnings into something spendable. Cleva is removing that friction entirely with a USD banking platform designed from the ground up for the African market.

Founded by Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel — veterans of Stripe, AWS, Twilio, and Akamai — Cleva emerged from Y Combinator's W24 batch with a product that lets users receive international payments directly into a U.S. dollar account, hold those dollars without exposure to local currency devaluation, and spend via a virtual Visa debit card wherever they choose.

What They're Building

Cleva's platform functions as a full-stack USD banking solution. Users get a U.S. bank account number that works with international wire transfers and ACH payments, a virtual dollar debit card for online spending, and a dashboard for managing balances across currencies. The product targets freelancers, remote workers, and small businesses across Africa who invoice international clients or work with global platforms.

The traction has been striking. Within just four months of launch, Cleva was processing over $1 million in monthly volume, with revenue growing 100% month-over-month. The company is registered as a FinCEN Money Services Business and has built a team of approximately 30 people. Lead investor 1984 Ventures backed the round alongside YC, The Raba Partnership, Byld Ventures, and FirstCheck Africa.

Why It Matters

Africa is home to a rapidly expanding class of globally connected knowledge workers and entrepreneurs who earn in dollars but live in currencies that can lose significant value year-over-year. Legacy banking infrastructure was never built to serve this population efficiently. Cleva's $1.5 million pre-seed gives it the runway to deepen its product, expand its regulatory footprint, and reach the full breadth of the addressable market across the continent.

About Tolu Alabi & Philip Abel

Tolu Alabi brings rare depth at the intersection of payments infrastructure and product leadership. Before co-founding Cleva, she served as Lead Product Manager at Stripe, where she owned Issuing and Banking — two of Stripe's most complex and regulated product lines. Prior to Stripe, she was a Senior PM at Amazon. She holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from Grinnell College. That combination of technical grounding, product rigor, and top-tier operator experience made her uniquely positioned to build a regulated fintech from scratch.

Philip Abel is an infrastructure engineer who has operated at the highest levels of cloud and telecommunications scale. His background spans AWS, Twilio, and Akamai — companies that collectively underpin much of the internet's financial and communication infrastructure. He studied Computer Science at MIT and Georgia Tech, giving him the theoretical foundation to architect systems that are both resilient and globally distributed. As Cleva's CTO, he leads the engineering that makes dollar banking reliable and fast for users across the African continent.

Together, Alabi and Abel bring complementary expertise that goes beyond most early-stage founding teams. Alabi's direct experience shipping banking products at Stripe means Cleva was built with compliance, trust, and user experience as first-order concerns. Abel's infrastructure pedigree ensures the platform can scale as volume grows. Their shared YC W24 cohort experience sharpened both the product direction and go-to-market focus, and the results — $1M+ in monthly volume within four months of launch, 100% month-over-month revenue growth — reflect a team that knows how to execute.

Stripe

Tolu's Last Role

Stanford

Tolu's MBA

MIT

Philip's Education

AWS

Philip's Last Role

Sources: Public press releases, SEC and state business filings, published interviews, news coverage, and company disclosures.

USD Banking Built for Africa

What They're Building

Why It Matters

About Tolu Alabi & Philip Abel

Founder Media Mentions for Tolu Alabi & Philip Abel