These Nigerian undergraduates left the University to launch crypto remittance company, Flux

One of the challenges young Nigerian entrepreneurs face when dealing with international clients is the challenge of payment processing.

Traditional remittance platforms in Nigeria have two basic problems that plague them: outrageous charges and slow deposit times. This has caused many Nigerian-based entrepreneurs and businesses to opt for better digital banking options when sending money to or receiving money from foreign countries, especially the U.S. and the U.K.

Two Nigerian-based software engineers, Ben Eluan and Osezele Orukpe, who got the idea for a better digital remittance platform, narrated their ordeal with these problems in 2019. The duo said they have executed a project for a UK-based client, but when it came to payment, they opted for Skrill. The process took up to a week, with huge amounts going into charges.

“The experience made us think of the payments and, more importantly, cross-border payments,” Eluan told TechCrunch. “The gig economy and the service economy for small businesses economy is very massive, and we care about it enough to dedicate all our time into building payments for Africa.”

Over the years, Africa has embraced crypto remittance, and more companies are rising to fill this need. Through an application and what is called a “wallet”, you can convert fiat currency into crypto and send it to the wallets of other people in any part of the world, who can also convert the cryptocurrency into and fiat currency they wish.

This is the same vision Flux CEO Eluan and CTO Orukpe say the company is running with. The crypto remittance platform was built to enable merchants from all over the world to send or receive money wherever they are.

Flux got accepted into Pioneer, an accelerator launched by ex-YC partner Daniel Gross, in May 2020. After the program, the company subsequently raised $77,000 in pre-seed investment from investors including Hustle Fund and Mozilla, among others. Pioneer provides founders with access to funds and supports talent outside Silicon Valley. It has so far, supported more than 100 founders who give up to 1% to join the accelerator. Depending on the progress they’ve made, Pioneer can either give them 5% at $20,000, 5% at $100,000, or 10% at $1 million.

The crypto remittance company, which is only six-months-old, has more than 5,000 customers who have transacted over $750,000 in volume, according to Eluan. He says the startup is growing 40% month-on-month and has made $25,000 in revenue, as reported by TechCrunch.

Despite the Central Bank of Nigeria’s restriction on crypto, Flux still saw strategic growth. The CBN recently ordered local banks in Nigeria to seize support for crypto transactions, which meant that crypto users could no longer convert fiat currency to crypto and vice-versa, or make crypto-based transactions using their local bank accounts or cards.

“We had to be compliant because of the CBN policy and our customers can’t really convert their crypto fiat but can still transact their crypto,” Eluan said. “This is why we want to make Flux available in the US and UK, where people can use Flux and send money to Nigeria. It’s currently not available but that’s what we’re building and is the next phase of our application.”

The Flux team is also working on a peer-to-peer feature that will allow users a seamless transaction with each other. It has also launched the Flux Merchant, a feature that allows merchants generate payment links for their products and services to send to their customers.

The Flux team of four friends and undergraduates met in their freshman year at the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife, Osun. They all studied various engineering disciplines and eventually formed a “programming club” with other software developers on campus. Eluan told TechCrunch that they regularly skipped classes to attend these sessions where they wrote codes and applications.

Before Flux, they built an e-commerce platform called Joppa, that helped people find nearby merchants within the city. Although the platform has 20,000 users, the business shut down because the team didn’t understand the dynamics to run a startup, Eluan said.