Ghanaian startup Liquify is a digital invoice finance platform for African SME exporters who are stuck waiting 30-90 days to get paid.
“We unlock cash trapped in their unpaid invoices: exporters upload an invoice, our platform runs KYC/AML and credit checks, and the invoices get funded within hours, not weeks, at a fraction of the cost,” Nadya Yaremenko, who founded Liquify alongside Alberta Asafo-Asamoah in 2023, told Disrupt Africa.
“We give global investors access to a new untapped asset class. Each invoice is a short-term, self-liquidating note showing almost zero correlation with public markets. We do it end-to-end and paper-free. From onboarding to settlement, everything happens on our digital platform – no couriers, no spreadsheets, no guesswork.”
Put simply, Liquify turns slow-paying invoices into same-day cash for African SMEs, and transforms an overlooked US$120 billion trade finance gap into a diversified financeable asset class for global capital.
Yaremenko spent over five years at Citi, where she managed a US$3 billion trade finance portfolio across emerging markets. As global banks increasingly pulled back from SMEs post-financial crisis, she saw the systemic funding gap growing. Determined to build a solution from the ground up, she left Citi to gain hands-on fintech experience on the continent – joining Adhara, a Series A startup building real-time financial infrastructure between Europe and Africa, where she led business and product development.
Asafo-Asamoah comes from the other side of the table. As an impact investor at TBN and Seedstars, she spent years allocating patient capital to African SMEs. While the intention was to enable growth, she saw how this capital often hit limits – unable to support sustainable, long-term SME growth.
They founded Liquify to change that. Their vision was to build a digital platform that would unlock the trade finance gap, holding back Africa’s most dynamic SMEs by enabling them to sell their verified export invoices directly to global financiers – via a fully automated, AI-powered platform that is “9x faster and cheaper” than traditional trade finance.
“The problem is structural – traditional trade finance is paperwork-heavy, expensive to administer, and too slow to meet the needs of smaller businesses. On average, it costs over US$10,000 and takes more than 10 days to serve a single SME – making it commercially unviable for banks, DFIs and smaller investors to participate,” said Yaremenko.
“At the same time, impact capital and grant funding, while helpful, are inherently limited – unable to offer the speed, repeatability, or returns required to scale SME growth sustainably.”
Liquify addresses this gap by offering a fully digital invoice finance platform, allowing SMEs to sell verified export receivables directly to global financiers. Unlike traditional lenders, it automates onboarding, risk checks, and disbursements using AI – making the process much faster and more cost-effective.
“While banks, local factoring firms, and some fintechs are in the space, most are either too slow, too manual, or focused on larger corporate clients. Liquify is purpose-built to serve growing SMEs – digitally, transparently, and at scale,” said Yaremenko.
The startup has raised an oversubscribed seed round of US$1.5 million from global and African investors like Techstars, Future Africa, Digital Africa, and Launch Africa Ventures, and also recently secured its first debt commitment from an impact lender.
“We are in late-stage conversation with several other financiers,” said Yaremenko. “A major early milestone was completing our first international invoice financing transactions just three months after launching, which has since grown to over 100 transactions totalling US$2.5 million in turnover.”
Uptake has been incredibly strong, she said.
“We’ve onboarded dozens of SME exporters, predominantly in agri-commodities. Once onboarded, they return frequently for repeat financing, often with larger invoice volumes. So far we’ve observed zero churn,” Yaremenko said.
Liquify currently operates in Ghana and Kenya, supporting exporters who trade with corporate buyers in the UK, Europe, and North America.
“Our next phase includes expanding into Nigeria and Francophone Africa, where demand is growing and trade finance access remains highly constrained,” Yaremenko said.
Liquify earns revenue by purchasing export invoices at a discount.
“We’re also piloting structured products for financiers and plan to roll out other tools for exporters, such as keeping track of all their trade documentation in one place,” said Yaremenko.
Navigating multi-country compliance and ensuring proper KYC/AML frameworks has been a major challenge for Liquify – especially across both UK and African regulatory environments.
“Convincing SMEs to shift away from informal credit also took time, but our speed and reliability have helped us build trust quickly. The biggest challenge, however, has been educating the broader market that SME trade finance isn’t just viable – it’s a scalable, investable asset class,” said Yaremenko.
