Here is the reason CapitalSage acquired Chimoney to build the Africa–Canada payments corridor

CapitalSage Vantage  Limited, a subsidiary of the Group, has acquired Chi Technologies Inc., the parent company of Chimoney, the Canada-based cross-border payment infrastructure startup, four weeks after its shutdown announcement.

“I’m looking forward to Chimoney continuing its mission to unlock economic opportunities for everyone under the CapitalSage umbrella and structure. I’m confident the team will scale up governance, liquidity, and go-to-market capabilities,”  Uchi Uchibeke, founder and CEO of Chimoney, said.

The acquisition will herald Capitalsage’s entry into the Canadian market.

Know more about CapitalSage and Chimoney. 

CapitalSage Holdings is well known in the ecosystem for its financial products, including Kolomoni. It raised ₦2.2 billion ($4 million) in debt, which was among the largest debt raises by an African financial technology startup in 2021.  Its other subsidiaries are producers of FMCG products under the John Vents Cocoa Products brand.

Chimoney was founded in 2022 by Uchi Uchibeke. Chimoney enabled businesses to pay freelancers and vendors in 41 currencies across Africa, North America, and Latin America. All with a single API.  Its thesis was to build a payment infrastructure that makes cross-border money movement as seamless as sending a message. It supported bank transfers, mobile money, airtime, gift cards, and stablecoin rails for off-ramps. 

In 2023, it joined the Techstars Toronto accelerator. Chimoney raised less than  $1 million in total funding. It acquired Scrim, a social payments app, in 2023.

Read also: Cross-border payment startup, Chimoney, shuts down after raising only $1 million in four years

The exit and what comes next 

The acquisition’s monetary value remained undisclosed. However, Uchibeke promised in an X post that “Every person who put capital into Chimoney will get their money back. That was the one thing I would not compromise on,” reiterating that this will be done at the close of the deal.

The Chimoney team will also be beneficiaries of the deal’s proceeds. 

Upon completion and relaunch, Chimoney will continue its day-to-day operations with plans to activate a US payments corridor. The Chimoney team, including Faheed Alli-Balogun (Head of Product) and Hammed Babatunde (Head of Operations), will join CapitalSage. 

Uchibeke will lead the transition for six months before handing over operations to the CapitalSage team. He plans to build APort, a company focused on pre-action authorization for AI agents, which has already produced the Open Agent Passport (OAP). 

The transaction will close in phases to accommodate Bank of Canada re-registration requirements under the Retail Payment Activities Act.  

What’s at play  

Think of Chimoney as the rails; Capital Sage wants to expand its reach on. 

In January 2026, the company was named one of Canada’s ten fintech startups to watch in 2026, cited specifically for holding both a FINTRAC MSB registration and a Bank of Canada PSP licence, a combination rare enough to be a differentiator in its own right.

That framing matters for reading this acquisition. Canada’s fintech story, as observers were noting at the start of the year, had moved past the challenger bank era and into infrastructure. Chimoney was being positioned squarely in that category. CapitalSage is acquiring that position.

Uchibeke said he preserved the licences, and that’s why the deal happened.

For a multinational group already operating licensed entities across the UK, UAE, Nigeria, Kenya, and The Gambia, a Canadian entity with that regulatory footprint will do the heavy lifting. It also has a talent powerhouse of Group CEO Abiola Bawuah, who spent over 25 years in banking across Africa, most recently as CEO of United Bank for Africa’s operations across 20 countries, and founder and Group Managing Director John Adedamola Alamu, who built CapitalSage from a microlending operation in 2014.

The acquisition also arrives at a moment when Canada’s fintech infrastructure layer is, by most accounts, still underleveraged. Chimoney was the only company on that January watchlist operating explicitly at the intersection of cross-border payments, digital identity, and AI agent infrastructure. That specificity — regulated wallets, W3C identity, policy controls for autonomous agents is what CapitalSage inherits, alongside the corridor ambitions.

This is yet another exit via the merger-and-acquisition route, as predicted by industry experts in 2026.