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Liquidity provides NALA with up to $50m credit facility via Mars Growth Capital

Liquidity has provided NALA with a credit facility of up to $50 million through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and MUFG Bank.

Undiluted Editorial2 min readUpdated

About the deal

Borrower
NALA
Amount
$50m
Facility
Private credit
Lenders
Liquidity, Mars Growth Capital
Sector
Fintech & Financial Services
Region
North America
Country
United States
Announced

Liquidity has provided NALA with a credit facility of up to $50 million through Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Liquidity and MUFG Bank. The parties announced the financing in New York on 28 May 2026.

The initial facility is $25 million, with a scale-up option of at least $50 million, and NALA said the money will be used as working capital to pre-fund customer accounts and to support global expansion, product development and operational scaling.

NALA is a Tanzania-founded stablecoin payments company, now headquartered in New York, that runs a consumer app and Rafiki, a B2B payments API. Benjamin Fernandes, Founder and Chief Executive, founded the company in 2017 as a money-transfer service in Tanzania and later expanded into foreign remittances, and Liquidity said it connects emerging markets across Africa and Asia.

NALA said it still holds more than half of the proceeds from a $40 million Series A announced in July 2024 and led by Acrew Capital, with participation from DST Global, Norrsken22, HOF Capital and existing investors including Amplo and NYCA Partners, after a $10 million seed in 2022. Liquidity said that allows the financing to be used to expand payment corridors without further shareholder dilution.

NALA said demand from enterprise customers for B2B stablecoin payments has increased over the past year, and Liquidity said the facility gives NALA the working capital to pre-fund larger customer accounts and to onboard enterprise contracts set to go live later in 2026.

Fernandes said the company had at times grown faster than it could handle pre-funding for single-direction payments. "Liquidity came in quickly and were highly flexible, so their tailored capital is a lifeline for us. It provides the cash required for NALA to pre-fund customer accounts and unlock our next phase of growth."

Paul Brodie, Global Head of Investments at Liquidity, said the firm structured a facility around NALA's stablecoin rails, real-time cross-border payments and growth in emerging-market corridors. "We conducted extensive bottom-up due diligence on NALA, stress-testing the model across a range of scenarios and created a bespoke, highly scalable facility that matches the sophistication of NALA's operations."

Liquidity said the diligence informed a structuring process that aligned the capital with NALA's payment flows and liquidity needs, and provided the facility through Mars Growth, its joint venture with MUFG. It describes itself as an AI-driven private credit and technology provider and said its in-house asset management subsidiary has deployed more than $2 billion across more than 45 verticals and 35 countries.

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Sources

  1. Liquidity announcement (opens in a new tab)LiquidityAnnouncement
  2. Launch Base Africa report (opens in a new tab)Launch Base AfricaReport
  3. NALA $40m Series A (opens in a new tab)TechCrunchReport