Flutterwave Brand Guidelines: A 2016 Lagos Payments API, Send App & a Public Logo System

A pan-African platform from Lagos and San Francisco.

Flutterwave is a payments technology company with roots in Lagos and a headquarters in San Francisco, English Wikipedia says. TechCrunch reported in March 2021 that it launched in 2016 as a Nigerian and US-based payments company with offices in both cities, and Y Combinator’s directory places it in the accelerator’s Summer 2016 batch. Sources name the founders differently: English Wikipedia names Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Olugbenga Agboola, while Y Combinator’s directory lists Agboola and Adeleke Adekoya. Agboola, known as “GB,” is the founder and chief executive, according to the company’s own announcements and Disrupt Africa.

The founding idea was a single connection to a fragmented market. Disrupt Africa wrote in March 2021 that Flutterwave lets banks and merchants replace many separate payment integrations with one API that can process any form of payment anywhere in Africa. Agboola told the publication that when Flutterwave was founded the payments landscape in Africa was highly fragmented, so the goal was a pan-African platform that made payments simpler for everyone. Y Combinator’s listing says the company was started by a team of finance and technology veterans from firms including Standard Bank, PayPal and Google Wallet.

Funding came in stages. Disrupt Africa lists a Series A in August 2017, an extension in 2018 and a Series B in January 2020. In March 2021 Flutterwave closed a Series C round led by Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global, which Disrupt Africa described as the largest amount ever secured by an African tech startup. Other backers named by TechCrunch included Greycroft, Salesforce Ventures and Worldpay FIS, and English Wikipedia records a further Series D round in 2022.

Checkout, a store and an app for sending money home.

Flutterwave’s main product is its checkout and payments API. In March 2021 the company said more than 290,000 businesses used its platform and could take payments in 150 currencies through cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers and its Barter app, TechCrunch reported; customers named by the publication included Booking.com, Flywire and Uber. Agboola told TechCrunch that the company was live in 20 African countries. Its US website today describes checkout, transfers, invoices and payment links for businesses.

Some products were built for small sellers. In 2020 Flutterwave introduced the Flutterwave Store, which TechCrunch reported had gone live in 15 African countries and helped more than 20,000 merchants set up storefronts and sell online. For people sending money home, Flutterwave launched a remittance service in 2021. On 1 August 2023 it relaunched that product as Send App by Flutterwave, with what it called “a new name, new look,” adding transfers from the US and Canada and new destinations in Egypt and Senegal, the company said. It added real-time support, live exchange-rate updates, an activity section that tracks transfers as they happen and a section for voucher codes.

Licences shaped what the company can do. In September 2022 ThisDay reported that the Central Bank of Nigeria had granted Flutterwave a switching and processing licence, letting it process transactions directly between financial service providers, merchants and customers; Flutterwave said the licence gave it more oversight of the payment value chain. In August 2024 Tech in Africa reported that the Bank of Ghana had granted it an Enhanced Category Payment Service Provider licence, covering collections, payouts, payment links and checkout.

Recognition is listed by English Wikipedia: Fast Company named Flutterwave among its Most Innovative Companies for 2024, and CNBC included it in its Disruptor 50 list the same year.

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 logo system set out in public.

Flutterwave has talked about a listing and has started to buy. In 2021 Agboola told TechCrunch that a listing was “very much in our plans,” and English Wikipedia says the company announced plans for an initial public offering in April 2024. In January 2026 Premium Times reported that Flutterwave had acquired Mono, a Lagos open-banking startup, the week before; English Wikipedia says the deal was all-stock and that Mono would continue to operate independently.

The brand itself is set out in public. Flutterwave’s online press kit offers a logo system in which the full-colour version is preferred, with monochrome, flat and inverted versions for other backgrounds, and icon-only versions supplied without the wordmark. Beside them it publishes a brand style guide covering logo, colour, typography, imagery, motion and application, and a separate tone of voice guide on language and writing. The kit asks users not to alter, stretch or recolour the artwork or add effects to it, and to use the inverted or white versions on dark backgrounds. The full logo, with its wordmark, is to be used wherever possible.

Send App has a kit of its own: wordmark lockups in a stacked arrangement for most uses and a horizontal one for wider spaces, each in black for light backgrounds and an off-white for dark or coloured ones, with separate brand guidelines covering colour, typography, imagery and motion. The 2023 relaunch also gave the app what the company called a new look.

For a design guide, Flutterwave shows how a payments company can document its own identity as openly as its API. Compare Paystack, the Lagos payments company it is often compared with, and dLocal, another processor built around emerging markets. For this guide we use charcoal, an ember orange and a warm gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Flutterwave’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.