Cardtonic, a Nigerian fintech startup, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to launch Pil, a standalone B2B card‑spend management platform—signalling a decisive move away from consumer-focused products toward building financial infrastructure.
The round was financed entirely by angel investors, with no venture capital firms or traditional financial institutions participating. This comes after several years of Cardtonic operating largely through bootstrapping, relying on revenue from its consumer-facing business to fuel growth.
Pil represents Cardtonic’s first product built outside its retail ecosystem. While the company’s existing offerings—virtual dollar cards, gift cards, eSIMs, and bill payments—serve individual users, Pil is built specifically for businesses with operational and financial management needs. The platform enables companies to:
- Fund corporate cards using naira, Ghanaian cedi, or stablecoins
- Manage recurring expenses with approval workflows
- Assign controlled access across teams
- Track and reconcile spending from a unified dashboard
A broader industry shift toward fintech infrastructure
Cardtonic’s pivot mirrors a wider pattern across Africa’s fintech landscape. Since early 2026, leading fintechs have increasingly moved to own and build underlying infrastructure, rather than rely solely on consumer product layers.
- Paystack acquired a microfinance bank, strengthening its regulatory and operational backbone.
- Flutterwave has continued expanding into core financial rails, deepening its infrastructure footprint.
This shift reflects a growing industry consensus: consumer fintech alone is difficult to scale sustainably without control over the foundational systems that power payments, settlements, and compliance.
Founded in 2019 by Balogun Usman and Faturoti Kayode, and now led by CEO Emmanuel Sohe, Cardtonic says Pil emerged as a direct response to its internal operational challenges. As the company grew, managing subscriptions, ads, and cross-border payments became increasingly difficult. Card limits shifted unpredictably, payments failed at critical times, and foreign transaction processes became unreliable and costly.
According to the founders, the company routinely spent tens of thousands of dollars monthly on tools, ads, and payment services—often relying on expensive third‑party platforms simply because no better solutions existed locally. In response, the team built an internal tool to stabilize spending, which eventually evolved into Pil.
What’s next for Pil
With the new funding, Cardtonic plans to position Pil as a comprehensive operating system for business spending across Africa ahead of its planned January 2026 launch. The product roadmap includes:
- Advanced spending and role-based controls
- Accounting and ERP integrations
- Infrastructure capable of supporting large teams and high transaction volumes
The seed raise places Cardtonic among a small but growing group of African fintechs securing early-stage capital amid an uneven market recovery. Seed-stage funding has begun to rebound, but pre-seed deals remain scarce—making Cardtonic’s infrastructure-focused pivot particularly notable six years after the company’s founding.
