Nigerian fintech startup Xara has crossed ₦10 billion in transaction volume and reached 50,000 users, marking its first anniversary with numbers that very few Nigerian startups, let alone WhatsApp-based ones, have put up in their first year.
The milestone arrived by the company’s 300th day of operation. Before that, Xara had already crossed ₦5 billion in transactions at the start of 2026, ₦120 million just two weeks after launching, and 22,000 users by its first 100 days. Each of those numbers landed faster than the last.
What makes the growth unusual is not just the speed but the platform. Xara runs entirely inside WhatsApp. No app download. No account number to memorise. No menus to navigate. You open WhatsApp, type what you want to do or send a voice note, and the transaction is complete. For many Nigerians, that is the first time banking has felt this simple.
The man behind it is Sulaiman Adewale, a software engineer from Osogbo who built Xara because of an eye condition.
“I have issues seeing things that are far,” he has said. “Whenever I go to buy stuff at the supermarket, I sometimes have to leave because I wouldn’t be able to see the account number. Even when I see it, it’s hard looking up and down multiple times because most of the numbers are blurry.”
That frustration, not being able to complete a simple payment, became the seed of Xara. The product he built to solve his own problem appears to have resonated with thousands of Nigerian users.
In the ten months after launch, Xara attracted a job offer from Elon Musk’s xAI after a demo went viral online. Adewale said he would only take the role if it did not come at the expense of his startup. It has not.
A year of building Xara, not just growing
Xara did not spend the year coasting on early momentum. In late December 2025, the team launched V3, a full platform upgrade that made the product significantly more capable than it was at launch.
In March 2026, Xara integrated crypto deposits via a partnership with Solana, enabling users to transact with USDC and USDT directly on WhatsApp. This is a feature that barely existed in African fintech before this.
Earlier this year, the company launched Xara for Business, opening the platform to merchants and operators. A partnership with Rubies Bank introduced new wallet details and improved the product’s overall banking infrastructure.
The result is a product that looks almost nothing like what launched a year ago, while running on the same simple premise: your chat is your bank.
WhatsApp is used by 95% of Nigeria’s 31.6 million social media users. Most Nigerian fintechs build apps and hope users download them. Xara skipped that entirely and built where the people already were. The ₦10 billion figure shows that the bet is paying off.
For context, that is roughly $6.2 million processed through a WhatsApp chat by a bootstrapped startup that has not announced any venture funding.
Read also: How a $5.5M cheque from Jim Ovia helped build Moniepoint into a unicorn
The broader signal here is about what Nigerians will actually use. Not the most feature-rich product. Not the most beautifully designed app. The one that removes the most friction. Xara’s first year is evidence that in Nigeria, the simplest interface can also be the most powerful one.
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