Google has announced the selection of four Nigerian startups: Bani, MasteryHive AI, Regxta, and Termii for the 10th cohort of the Google for Startups Accelerator Africa, underscoring Nigeria’s continued prominence in the continent’s technology ecosystem.
The cohort reflects a broader shift toward AI-driven, infrastructure-focused innovation, particularly within financial services, where startups are increasingly addressing foundational inefficiencies rather than building purely consumer-facing products.
Selected from thousands of applications, the four companies represent a cross-section of startups building the plumbing of Africa’s digital economy—from payments and credit to compliance and communications.
Bani: Rewiring Cross-Border Payments for African Trade
Bani is focused on solving one of the most persistent barriers to economic integration in Africa: the inefficiency of cross-border payments. Businesses operating across African markets often face long settlement cycles, high transaction costs, and dependence on intermediary banks outside the continent.
Bani is building payment infrastructure designed to streamline these processes by enabling faster, more direct settlement between markets. Its approach aims to reduce friction in international transactions, making it easier for African businesses to trade both within the continent and globally.
The startup’s relevance is amplified by the ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which seeks to boost intra-African trade but remains constrained by financial infrastructure gaps. By addressing these bottlenecks, Bani is positioning itself as a key enabler of pan-African commerce and liquidity movement.
MasteryHive AI: Automating Compliance and Fraud Detection with Artificial Intelligence
MasteryHive AI operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence and financial regulation, providing tools that automate complex back-office operations for financial institutions.
Banks and fintech companies across Africa face mounting pressure to manage fraud, reconcile transactions, and comply with anti-money laundering regulations all while scaling rapidly. Traditionally, these processes are manual, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
MasteryHive AI addresses this challenge by deploying AI models that can detect anomalies in real time, automate reconciliation processes, and flag suspicious activities for compliance teams. This reduces operational overhead while improving accuracy and responsiveness.
As financial systems across Africa expand, the need for robust regulatory technology (RegTech) solutions is becoming more urgent. MasteryHive AI is positioning itself as a critical intelligence layer that enables financial institutions to scale securely and efficiently.
Regxta: Expanding Credit Access to Africa’s Underserved Businesses
Regxta is tackling financial exclusion by rethinking how creditworthiness is assessed for micro and small businesses. Across Africa, millions of entrepreneurs operate in the informal economy without access to traditional banking services or formal credit histories.
Regxta uses alternative data such as transaction patterns and behavioral indicators to build credit profiles for these underserved users. It complements this with a hybrid distribution model that combines digital platforms with physical agents, ensuring reach even in areas with limited digital penetration.
By unlocking access to financing, Regxta enables small businesses to invest, grow, and participate more fully in the formal economy. Its model directly addresses a structural gap in Africa’s financial system, where lack of credit access remains a major constraint on economic growth.
In this sense, Regxta is not just a fintech solution but a financial inclusion engine, bridging the divide between informal enterprises and formal financial systems.
Termii: Powering Reliable Communication for Digital Financial Services
Termii provides the messaging infrastructure that underpins digital services, particularly in fintech. In many African markets, unreliable message delivery especially for one-time passwords (OTPs) and transaction alerts—can disrupt user experiences and erode trust in digital platforms.
Termii addresses this by offering APIs that ensure the reliable and timely delivery of critical communications, including authentication messages, payment confirmations, and fraud alerts. Its platform uses intelligent routing and optimization to improve delivery success rates across diverse telecom networks.
As digital financial services continue to scale, the importance of dependable communication infrastructure cannot be overstated. Termii plays a largely invisible but essential role in ensuring that users can securely access and interact with financial platforms.
In effect, the company functions as part of the core infrastructure layer that sustains trust and usability in Africa’s digital economy.
Significance of Inclusion
The inclusion of these four startups highlights a clear trend: Africa’s innovation ecosystem is maturing beyond surface-level applications toward deep, infrastructure-led solutions powered by AI.
Together, Bani, MasteryHive AI, Regxta, and Termii represent different layers of a rapidly evolving financial stack payments, compliance, credit, and communication each essential to building scalable and resilient digital systems.
The Google for Startups Accelerator Africa, which runs from April to June 2026, will provide the startups with mentorship, technical support, and access to Google’s AI and cloud tools, positioning them for accelerated growth.
Their selection reinforces Nigeria’s role as a leading hub for innovation on the continent and signals where the next wave of value creation in African tech is likely to emerge: in the infrastructure that powers everything else.
