Georgia | Lisk รีทวีตแล้ว
Somewhere in Nairobi right now, a designer is submitting an invoice to a studio in Amsterdam.
The work is done. The project shipped. What happens next is where the story usually falls apart.
The payment leaves Europe. It hits a correspondent bank. Then another. Three days later, half of what she earned is still in transit. The other half arrived with fees she never agreed to quietly subtracted.
This is not one person’s story. It is 400 million people’s story.
Traditional banking was built for local economies. It handles domestic payrolls and local borders just fine. But for the borderless African workforce of freelancers, remote teams, and global contractors, the legacy banking system is a literal tax on their geography.
Benaiah Wepundi(@b3npayd) decided to build the infrastructure they actually needed. He called it Payd(@paydhq).
Growing up in Kericho, Benaiah watched post-election violence reshape his community. He learned early that legacy systems often fail the people who need them most.
He went to university to study law, drawn to the rooms where decisions are made, but financial challenges pulled him out after a year and a half.
So he freelanced. And he lived, firsthand, every single payment friction point he would later spend years solving.
He eventually climbed to a COO role at a US company, earning 500,000 Kenya Shillings a month. It was the kind of security most people spend a decade chasing.
He quit.
So plan. No round closed. Just a frustration he could not shake and a problem he understood from the inside.
Since December 2022, Payd has scaled significantly:
- Monthly GMV: Over $1M.
- Reach: 8,000+ active users across 35 countries.
- Technology: Leveraging stablecoin settlement rails across 10+ blockchain networks.
- Efficiency: Payments from Berlin reach an M-PESA wallet in Nairobi in seconds, not days.
70% of that volume is B2B, featuring remote work agencies and talent networks paying African teams at scale.
Benaiah is not stopping at payments. He is also building Vabu, a creator monetization platform. He isn’t just building financial infrastructure. He is building the full economic stack for the people the industry keeps treating as afterthoughts.
400 million freelancers in emerging markets did not need another wallet. They needed someone who had been one of them and was angry enough to build what the system refused to.
Benaiah Wepundi is building from Nairobi. For the world.
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