Flutterwave hits $3.2 billion valuation in Series E as Ripple takes a stake and wires RLUSD into African payments

Flutterwave has closed a Series E round at a $3.2 billion valuation, with Ripple taking a strategic investment and planning to plug RLUSD and the XRP Ledger into Flutterwave’s network. For PSPs and merchants operating in Africa, the important part is not the headline number; it is the settlement stack Ripple is trying to sit inside.

1. Ripple’s investment is part of Flutterwave’s Series E round, which the company says values it at $3.2 billion. Bloomberg put the valuation as high as $3.3 billion, citing comments from Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga “GB” Agboola. Neither company disclosed the size of Ripple’s cheque or the ownership stake it bought.
2. The deal is not just capital. Flutterwave plans to embed Ripple’s USD-denominated stablecoin, RLUSD, into its payment rails and Send App remittance corridors as a settlement asset for high-volume channels. The companies also plan to use the XRP Ledger (XRPL) for transaction clearing, with a unified API connecting Flutterwave’s domestic payment network to Ripple Payments, Ripple’s cross-border payments network.
3. Flutterwave says it processes payments across 35 African countries, has handled more than one billion transactions worth over $50 billion since launch, and has raised over $500 million in funding to date. That makes it one of the larger distribution points Ripple can get into on the continent without building the rails itself.
4. This is not Flutterwave’s first stablecoin move. In October 2025, the company partnered with Polygon Labs to launch stablecoin payments for businesses. It has also acquired API startup Mono to consolidate fragmented banking data and rails under its platform. This January, the fintech company rolled out stablecoin wallets fo

For high-risk operators, the practical read is straightforward: Flutterwave is continuing to stack stablecoin functionality on top of its existing African payments footprint, while Ripple is trying to make RLUSD and XRPL part of day-to-day settlement rather than a side experiment.