Kosisochukwu Nathan Agama, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Brydge, an intra-Africa trade facilitation platform operating out of Lagos, Nigeria and New York, USA has said he is optimistic about the potential in the trade industry in Africa.
He believes that although intra-African trade currently sits between 7 and 30 percent of the total trade volume, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement could unlock up to a $3 trillion market opportunity.
As the budding business sustains its momentum, it is announcing even more exciting products as it celebrates its 1st anniversary. With Deal Room, Brydge launches a marketplace for end-to-end B2B functions, streamlining sourcing, procurement, payment, and delivery.
Within its first year of operations, Brydge picked up quite a few key lessons. Worthy of note is the fact that some aspects of African trade remain largely informal, creating a gap between formal large businesses and informal small traders.
In the B2B marketplace, the product is expected to connect businesses across the value chain. Now, the focus is on information, documents, compliance, and goods movement beyond just payments.
Next to that is payment links, an essential component of financial technology solutions. Typically, a merchant provides a payer with this link, which gives them an array of options to initiate payment, from card to transfer, bank payment and Apple Pay.
This enables businesses to receive payments across South Africa, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, etc., without the need for an entity setup, with multi-currency conversion features, and then expanded African payouts. There is also the trade financing product with features such as invoice discounting, factoring, and other financing services.
It goes without saying who Brydge is built for. Think of businesses that are exhausted from using multiple tools for procurement and payments. With this ‘power of one’ platform for sourcing credible vendors, payments, and documentation, businesses can enable team-based approvals: operations approve invoices, treasury approves payments.
For sellers, they can receive payments in preferred currency sans being limited to their local market.
Recently, at the Digital Pay Expo 2025, themed Beyond Borders: Digital Trade & Payment, Nathan Agama led an insightful conversation on “Cross-Border Payments as a Catalyst for Africa’s Economic Integration” as the keynote speaker. The session brought together other influential voices driving seamless payments across the continent, such as Opay, Zestpay, Flutterwave, etc. From interoperability to policy frameworks, he shared bold ideas and practical strategies for digital transformation.
As the startup marks its anniversary and looks to its future as the entity leading the charge on intra-African trade facilitation, the mission is simple: to enable Nigerian SMEs to trade across all 54 African countries, creating a ‘borderless Africa.’ Nathan Agama and his team have got big, goals. They want to help SMEs sell to all 54 African countries from a single platform, obliterating the limitations of language, currency, and location.
“I will be damned if another startup came and outworked and out-executed Brydge in intra-Africa trade,” Agama declares
Together with his team, he has doubled down on intra-African trade payments, building the operating system for merchants and funders in trade, and the results speak volumes.
In just one year, the startup hit 4.8 billion naira in General Merchandise Volume (GMV), operates in 12 trade corridors across Africa and is backed by MasterCard Foundation and 54 Collective.
Brydge also won the Pre-Incubation Start-up Competition in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, it operates in nine pilot countries with eight banking partners and 45 active merchants.
Nathan Agama had started out solving the payment processing challenge for businesses in Africa, empowering them with a platform that enables them to pay merchants anywhere across the continent.
Over time, he realised that payment wasn’t enough. He and his team expanded their offerings. Now, Brydge is not just another FinTech solution provider. It has expanded to become the go-to platform for businesses looking for unified tools for procurement and payments across the 54 African countries.
Brydge empowers importers, exporters, and procurement teams to seamlessly source, verify, approve, pay, and track every step of their trade— all from one fast, secure, and fully integrated platform.
The startup provides its users with ease of trading, offering real-time settlement in local currencies without the need for intermediaries.
How did this all begin? Eight years ago, Nathan Agama was an importer/exporter, selling across a myriad African countries, from Nigeria to Ghana, Morocco and Kenya. After several experiences with a major issue—cross-border payments via SWIFT, which takes about 4-5 days—he built Brydge.
He continues to grow and expand the technology to meet users’ needs. The idea is to become the ‘Merchant on Record’ in the traders’ country of trade, eliminating the need to set up multiple entities across 54 countries—the thought in and of itself is mind-numbing, and the execution? Certainly cumbersome.
For instance, Ghana has a 50 percent local partnership requirement for setup, which several SMEs may not meet, thereby limiting their operations and options for cross-border payment facilitation as they start. This means that some of these small to medium-scale businesses are unable to access formal banking solutions.
For large companies, solutions such as letters of credit exist, while small traders use informal cash-based methods; however, mid-sized businesses still struggle. As the ‘Merchant on record,’ Brydge provides virtual accounts and mobile money collection to these enterprises to solve this problem.
To the customer, this is life-changing news as the startup enables consolidated multi-country operations, providing real-time transaction settlement with competitive African rates (not USD-dependent), enhanced security.
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