East Africa · open infrastructure
The payment stack African fintech is built on.
Zirzir is the open-source layer underneath a licensed product — so a company in Addis or Nairobi can launch on the rails people already use, instead of spending eighteen months reinventing them.
Who this is for
Not a checkout plugin for a shop. The infrastructure a fintech is founded on.
Founders
Ship a wallet, lender, or marketplace on Telebirr and M-Pesa without standing up a 40-person payments team.
Investors
One MIT-licensed stack instead of a new gateway integration in every portfolio company. No lock-in. Data stays where you put it.
Governments
Open source, self-hostable, local rails first. A standard that does not route African money through a foreign black box.
Press
The story is not another Stripe for Africa. It is African notes, African names, and infrastructure written here.
A standard, not another gateway
Every African market has its own rails: USSD in Ethiopia, STK in Kenya, a new PDF for each aggregator. Today each startup copies that work in private.
Zirzir publishes it. One charge() call.
MIT licence. Self-host on your soil, or run Cloud. If it is in the open source
today, it stays there.
The aim is unglamorous: become the default layer a regulator, a fund, and a founding engineer can all point at.
The money already in circulation
Birr. Shilling. Telebirr, CBE, Chapa, M-Pesa, Airtel Money. The notes and the phones, not a card network bolted on afterwards.
See the rails →Start a conversation
Funds, ministries, newsrooms, and operators — write to us. Engineers go to zirzir.dev.