Nigerian Banking-as-a-Service platform, Maplerad, a fintech described by its founders, Miracle Anywanwu and Obinna Chukwujioke, as a global BaaS player targeting Africa, has raised $6 million in seed funding. According to sources, the U.S.-based Maplerad, which is coming out of stealth, raised the round at a $30 million valuation. The founders declined to comment.

Maplerad’s journey as a company can be traced back to 2020, when the founders launched its first product, Wirepay. The app started by helping users make international payments by offering cross-border payment solutions in fiat and cryptocurrency. However, it has since shifted into a self-described all-in-one financial product that enables users to receive, hold, and make payments in multiple currencies, create virtual and physical cards, and pay bills.

Last year, Wirepay raised an undisclosed pre-seed, including a $125,000 cheque from OnDeck. Golden Palm Investments Corporation, Greenhouse Capital, some Stash executives, and Berrywood Capital.

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As Wirepay grew to have more than 50,000 users, most of them in Nigeria, Anywanwu revealed that the businesses started to ask about the in-house infrastructure that powered the features on its consumer app. “People wanted to use the infrastructure powering Wirepay, our licence coverages, and banking relationships,” the CEO and CTO stated.

Anywanwu also mentioned that Maplerad (the parent company) had always wanted to spin off this infrastructure for other businesses. But when they got a lot of requests from outside, they finally made plans to beta-launch Maplerad, the infrastructure product that lets companies add powerful financial features like accounts, payments, foreign exchange (FX), and cards to their products, in August.

“From day one, when we built Wirepay for our consumers, we knew the end move would be infrastructural even though we didn’t start the business infrastructure first. For anyone to build anything finance-related, they have a whole lot of banking stack that they have to start with and even before integrating features, they have to go past many hurdles,” said the chief executive. “One of them is banking relationships and compliance. The other is licencing. So Maplerad is solving financial infrastructure problems for these businesses in Africa. We handle that whole stack and provide the best-in-class APIs to use that can make you launch a financial product within five minutes. So instead of a company spending 8 months and a couple of million dollars to start building a fintech product, you can integrate with our APIs and go live."