Timon: Two founders built a stablecoin-powered app from a stranded experience abroad

Every year, millions of Africans travel for work, study, business and leisure, expecting that in an increasingly connected world, moving money across borders should be as simple as booking a flight. Yet for many travellers, crossing a border often means entering an entirely different financial reality. 

When Oluwatomi Ayorinde landed in Germany in 2011, he thought he had done everything right. Before the trip, his manager at SAP had advised him to get a credit card. Unable to access one, he settled for a dollar card issued in Nigeria. It worked until it didn’t. Stranded in Mannheim with a card that kept being declined and no straightforward way to move money across borders, Ayorinde had to rely on a colleague to get through the trip. 

“I had money, but in that moment it didn’t matter because I couldn’t access it,” Ayorinde recalls. “Being stranded in a foreign country because your card won’t work is an incredibly unsettling feeling. After that experience, I never travelled without cash again.”

Nearly a decade later, another entrepreneur, Chizaram Ucheaga, found himself in a strikingly similar situation in France. His card was declined at a point of sale, forcing him to hand over physical naira to a friend in exchange for euros. “It was very embarrassing,” he recalls.

At the time, neither founder knew that those moments, experienced years apart, in different countries, would eventually lead them to build the same company. 

Today, Ayorinde, whose previous company, PayForce, was acquired by FairMoney, and Ucheaga, founder of financial inclusion startup Clymb Technologies, are building Timon, a stablecoin-powered travel and payments product for globally mobile Africans.  

The startup, which recently got accepted into Alliance, one of the world’s most selective crypto accelerators, is betting that the next big opportunity in African tech isn’t getting money into the continent but helping a new generation of Africans spend, preserve, and move their wealth seamlessly around the world. 

When experience meets opportunity 

Ayorinde’s career began at AppZone, helping build BankOne, a cloud-based platform that became widely used by Nigeria’s microfinance banks, before spending six years at SAP implementing enterprise systems across Africa. The work exposed him to gaps in the financial infrastructure and eventually led him to strike out on his own.  

His first product, an offline data-collection software then called Mobile Forms, didn’t take off. But the pivot became YC-backed CrowdForce, which eventually raised a $3.6 million Series A and was later acquired by FairMoney in 2023.   

“Our breakthrough came when the Nigerian government launched TraderMoni and needed millions of informal traders to be identified and verified. We had already built a network of nearly 50,000 agents across the country,” he shared. “We ultimately processed about 4.5 million records.” 

Ucheaga, on the other hand, helped build Mavis Talking Books, an offline learning platform that grew to include more than 50 literacy, numeracy and language titles funded by the US Embassy, DFID, and state governments. In 2022, he founded Clymb Technologies and launched RyzaPay, an agent banking platform.  

“We onboarded over 300 agents and processed over $6 million in its first year,” Ucheaga recounts. “Alongside this, I mentored over 60 startups as a director at Founder Institute, which was where I met Ayorinde.”  

Years later, the pair reconnected and discovered they had both experienced the same frustration. Rather than accept it as an unavoidable part of travel, they decided to build a solution that would help people move and spend money seamlessly across borders. 

Named after the adventurous meerkat from The Lion King, Timon is built on a simple belief that crossing borders should not mean leaving your financial life behind.  

One of Timon’s biggest growth engines came from a direction the founders hadn’t initially anticipated. As more users sought faster and more efficient ways to fund their accounts and protect against currency volatility, the company expanded its offerings to include stablecoins. 

“We’ve processed more than $34 million in transaction volume as of March 2026, and today, roughly 70% of the funds that come onto the platform are through stablecoins,” says Ucheaga. 

Through Timon, users can fund their wallets with local currencies, U.S. dollars or stablecoins and access a suite of cross-border services, including virtual and physical cards, international transfers, local payouts and eSIMs in more than 200 countries. 

“It integrates with local payment rails across multiple markets, so users can pay like locals wherever they travel, whether by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, mobile money, or other methods preferred in that market. We also offer U.S. dollar accounts and multi-currency wallets that support customers across 16 African countries,” says Ayorinde.  

A problem-free philosophy 

For Ayorinde and Ucheaga, Timon’s ambitions extend well beyond solving failed card transactions abroad. They believe they are building for a fundamental shift in how Africans will store, move, and spend money over the next decade. 

That conviction is also what attracted Alliance, which accepted Timon into its accelerator programme and backed the company as part of its latest cohort. According to the founders, Alliance saw the same long-term trend they did: a growing class of globally mobile Africans who earn internationally, preserve wealth in stablecoins, and increasingly expect their money to move as freely as they do. 

“Stablecoins aren’t just another payment method,” says Ayorinde. “They’re becoming the infrastructure layer for the global money movement. We think every financial company that wants to remain relevant over the next twenty years needs a stablecoin strategy.” 

That belief is shaping Timon’s next phase. Over the coming months, the company plans to expand funding and payout corridors, introduce travel insurance and group travel savings features, deepen its stablecoin infrastructure, and eventually launch AI-powered travel-planning tools alongside flight and hotel booking services. 

“We often describe Timon as the Revolut for African travellers,” says Ucheaga. “But what we’re really building is a financial passport.” 

For Ayorinde, the end state is even simpler. “In the future, people will travel with two passports,” he says. “Their national passport and their financial passport. We want Timon to become that financial passport.