Cross-border business commerce across emerging markets is scaling at a breakneck pace, but the archaic, Western-centric financial backend powering it is pushing against its limits.

Sika, an infrastructure startup building an alternative financial market highway for Africa and the Global South, has raised a $2 million from West African gender-lens growth equity firm Aruwa Capital Management.

Founded in 2023 by fintech engineer Emmanuel Ashirifi, Sika is betting that as regional trade blocks like the African Continental Free Trade Area expand, financial institutions will desperately need institutional-grade infrastructure that eliminates their reliance on the traditional, highly restrictive legacy banking systems.

“Financial markets cannot scale efficiently without trusted infrastructure. While capital, trade, and investment increasingly move across emerging markets, the underlying systems responsible for clearing, settlement, liquidity, and risk management remain fragmented.” Emmanuel Ashirifi, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sika

Rewiring the dollar detour

Sika is tackling what insiders call the “correspondent banking trap.” Currently, a transaction between commercial banks or corporate enterprises in neighboring countries like Nigeria and Ghana is rarely settled directly. Instead, the transaction routes through an offshore correspondent bank in London or New York, requiring a costly double-conversion into US dollars or Euros before reaching the destination currency.

This detour imposes heavy transaction fees, manual processing delays, and dependency on hard currency liquidity.

Sika’s proprietary ClearNet platform bypasses this pathway by operating as a wholesale clearing network. Using automated multilateral netting, a mechanism that groups and cancels out offsetting financial claims among multiple regional participants, Sika allows institutions to settle trades directly in local currencies. The real-time liquidity aggregation reduces principal settlement risk and lowers the amount of dollar reserves regional banks must hold to facilitate trade.

Moving up the infrastructure stack

While early African fintech waves heavily prioritized consumer payments and retail lending, venture capital has steadily migrated toward unglamorous, high-margin business-to-business infrastructure. Sika sits firmly in this wholesale tier. Its current customer footprint consists entirely of enterprise accounts, including Tier-1 commercial banks, regional stock exchanges, corporate treasuries, brokers, and high-volume payment providers.

The startup has already built out a regulatory and operational footprint spanning several jurisdictions, quietly supporting clearing and settlement pipelines across more than 15 fiat currencies throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.

According to Ashirifi, the fresh capital will be heavily weaponized to navigate the complex regulatory landscapes that fragment emerging markets. Sika will use the funds to expand its compliance licensing, deepen its risk-management capabilities, and build out its developer team to add more emerging market currency corridors to ClearNet.

The institutional mandate

For Aruwa Capital, the startup met its dual mandate of backing businesses with strong growth potential and a workforce that reflects gender parity.

In an ecosystem where technical leadership is overwhelmingly male-dominated, Sika’s internal metrics stood out during Aruwa’s due diligence process. Women make up 50% of Sika’s senior executive management team and account for 37% of its total global workforce.

“Sika is addressing one of the most fundamental challenges facing financial markets across Africa and other emerging economies: the lack of efficient and trusted infrastructure for cross-border settlement,” said Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, Founder and Managing Partner of Aruwa Capital. “The company’s technology, regulatory strategy, and infrastructure-first approach position it to become an important enabler of trade and capital formation.”