Paystack Brand Guidelines: A Lagos Payments API, Y Combinator 2016 & Stripe’s 2020 Deal

Two engineers, a payment form and Y Combinator.

Paystack is a payments company from Lagos, Nigeria. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2015 by two software engineers, Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi; Y Combinator’s company directory lists Akinlade as founder and chief executive and Olubi as founder and chief technology officer. The public launch came in 2016: the BBC reported in November 2020 that Akinlade co-launched Paystack that year so that merchants in Nigeria and Ghana could be paid by anyone, anywhere in the world.

The idea began small. TechCrunch reported in October 2020 that Akinlade had built, for fun, a quick way of putting a card payment into a web page, and that the simplicity of it led the two founders to turn it into something other businesses could use. Akinlade told the publication that the payments system Paystack worked in was “super broken” and that most of what it would build in Africa “has not been built yet.” Paystack joined Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator, in its Winter 2016 batch, according to Y Combinator’s directory; TechCrunch described it as the first startup from Nigeria to be accepted.

Early partnerships were about reaching online sellers. In November 2016 Disrupt Africa reported that Paystack had launched a payment solution for Shopify merchants, as Shopify moved into the Nigerian market and needed a gateway that could sign up Nigerian merchants straight away. Olubi told the publication that the mission was to build a payments product for Africa that would act as a catalyst for the continent’s online economy. In 2018 Stripe led an investment round in Paystack, with Visa and Tencent taking part, TechCrunch reported. By then, the same publication later recalled, Paystack was handling about 15 percent of online payments in Nigeria for more than 10,000 businesses, and Ghana was its next market.

An API, a checkout and its documentation.

Paystack sells a payments API: software that lets a business accept money on its own website or app. Y Combinator’s listing describes payments by credit card, debit card, money transfer and mobile money. In September 2021 TechCrunch reported that Nigerian merchants could take Apple Pay through Paystack, with the option appearing at checkout for shoppers who had it set up; the publication called Paystack the first payment gateway in Nigeria to support it. The same report named Paystack’s hosted Commerce tools, Storefronts and Invoices, and channels including cards, mobile money, USSD and QR codes.

Design runs through the way the company has been described. When Stripe announced the purchase, its co-founder and chief executive Patrick Collison told TechCrunch that Paystack had put “a lot of original thinking” into how to do things, and that it “gets it” — “it’s clear from the site and from the product sensibilities.” In May 2021 Paystack’s head of product expansion told the same publication that its South African pilot had focused on removing paperwork and on “world-class API documentation” for developers.

Scale appears in dated reports rather than in a single official figure. In October 2020 TechCrunch put Paystack at about 60,000 customers, from small businesses and larger companies to fintechs and educational institutions. The BBC reported in November 2020 that Paystack processed more than half of all web payments in Nigeria and served more than 60,000 organisations, including FedEx, UPS and MTN. By January 2026 Premium Times gave about 300,000 businesses and operations in five countries.

Integrations widened that reach. TechCrunch noted in September 2021 that Paystack merchants were already taking international payments through integrations with the commerce platforms Wix and Shopify.

Design and documentation.

Payment processors and wallets present themselves in more than one place at once. A merchant meets them at the counter and in the checkout, a developer meets them in documentation, and an investor meets them on corporate pages about owners and listings. Each of those surfaces carries the brand in a different register.

At the counter, the brand is often a device. Global Payments, for example, described a modular countertop terminal for its Genius platform in November 2025, with a 15.6-inch merchant display, hidden cable management and stand, kiosk and wall-mount configurations, according to its release. Online, the brand shows up as a list of methods: PayU’s European corporate site sorts its offer into cards and digital wallets, online bank transfers, deferred payments and local schemes such as BLIK.

For developers, processors publish their own entry points. PayU’s Indian site links documentation and an API Playground, and its European site links a Developer Portal and a public status page. The Indian site also lists a mobile app SDK, a software kit for adding payments to apps, among its payment products.

Corporate pages tell the ownership story. PayU’s Indian site describes the business as part of Prosus, listed in Amsterdam and Johannesburg and majority owned by Naspers, while Global Payments’ investor site gives its New York Stock Exchange ticker, GPN, and its releases record deals such as the Worldpay purchase completed in January 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, and what its own pages say about its products and markets.

A Stripe company with a group of its own.

Stripe announced that it was buying Paystack in October 2020. TechCrunch reported on 15 October 2020 that Paystack would continue to operate independently, and quoted Akinlade: “Paystack was not for sale when Stripe approached us.” Expansion followed. In May 2021 TechCrunch reported Paystack’s official launch in South Africa, after a six-month pilot, alongside its business in Nigeria and Ghana; Paystack told the publication that it preferred careful, country-by-country launches because each market has different rules. “Our goal isn’t to have a presence in lots of countries, with little regard for service quality,” a Paystack product marketer said.

Ten years on, the company reaches beyond payments. In January 2026 Premium Times reported the launch of Paystack Microfinance Bank, which followed Paystack’s purchase of Ladder Microfinance Bank; the company said the bank would run separately from Paystack Payments Limited, with its own licence and governance, and would open first to a small group of users. The same report mentioned Zap, a consumer payments app launched the year before.

Days later Punch reported, on Paystack’s tenth anniversary, a planned parent holding company, The Stack Group, with Stripe, Akinlade and Paystack employees as founding shareholders. It is meant to sit over Paystack, the microfinance bank, Zap and a new venture studio, TSG Labs. Punch said the agreements were awaiting regulatory approval: agreed in October 2025; not completed at the time of writing. The newspaper listed Paystack as licensed and operating in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire.

For a design guide, Paystack shows how a payments brand can be judged by its checkout and its developer documentation as much as by its mark. Compare Stripe, its owner since 2020, and Flutterwave, the Lagos payments company it is often compared with. For this guide we use an ink blue, a teal and a pale sky tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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