Borderless is known for helping Africans in the diaspora collectively invest in start-ups and real estate back home. Since its launch in 2024, the United Kingdom-based platform has processed over USD 500,000 in transactions. The company’s founder, Joe Kinvi, got the business idea when he joined Touchtech Payments in 2017 as head of finance.
The Irish start-up back then couldn’t afford his full salary, resulting in Kinvi negotiating for stock to make up the difference. Eighteen months later, Stripe (another Irish-American multinational financial services and SaaS company) acquired the business. This led to the equity being converted into Stripe shares, enough to let Kinvi leave his job and eventually establish “Borderless.”
“The diaspora sends billions of dollars in remittances, but very little of it goes into productive assets. We think that there is a world where, if we can bring the right collective to the right type of investment opportunities, it’ll make it a lot easier for them,” Kinvi told TechCrunch.
Knowing Things In Detail
Borderless is on a mission: to become the African diaspora’s biggest asset manager. For the venture, diaspora investments will be critical to unlock the continent’s economic prosperity, and it is right now building the infrastructure to enable this capital flow.
Joe Kinvi’s journey to Borderless started in 2020, just before the COVID pandemic hit. He and his friends formed Hoaq, an investment club that pooled small checks from local and diasporan angels into African start-ups. Their first challenge was simply opening a bank account.
They faced a setback as the financial institutions flagged their activity, leading to their account with fintech Wise being repeatedly frozen. This followed other hurdles like currency mismatches, regulatory requirements, and accreditation rules that made collective investing a legal and logistical headache.
To manage the complexity, the Kinvi-led group used membership dues to hire a lawyer to handle the paperwork manually. Eventually, Hoaq built light automation into its workflow, an experience that laid the foundation for Borderless. By 2022, Kinvi had left Stripe, where he had transitioned into a product and growth-related leadership role, and later spent a year at Paystack, another Stripe subsidiary, helping scale financial partnerships across Africa.
Learning lessons from the Hoaq fiasco, Joe Kinvi ended up building a tool that digitised everything from onboarding to disbursement. It proved to be an instant hit, with other collectives approaching Borderless for access not just to start-up deals but to real estate and other assets. As of June 2025, Borderless provides the backend infrastructure for diaspora collectives, allowing them to onboard members, accept cross-border payments, and deploy capital securely.
Registering Steady Growth
The start-up has reportedly over 100 communities on its waitlist. Over the past couple of months, the collectives live on the platform have backed over 10 start-ups and two real estate projects in Kenya, with minimum investments of USD 1,000 for start-ups and USD 5,000 for property. Borderless operates under British regulatory cover, permitting the venture to market investment opportunities to diaspora members without violating securities laws.
For now, it focuses on two asset classes: start-ups and real estate. But Kinvi sees room to expand into others, including film and diaspora bonds. Borderless’ business model works heavily upon the trust factor, with Kinvi citing incidents like diaspora investors losing money trying to invest informally through family or friends.
“Someone I know sent 200,000 euros home to build a house. The house was never built,” he added.
Borderless routes investor funds directly to verified sellers, escrow accounts, or lawyers. No money flows through the hands of collective managers. Legal and compliance checks are embedded into the process, and all opportunities require approval under the platform’s regulatory umbrella.
Borderless only collaborates and builds impactful collectives or syndicates. Right now, it is launching more tools for investment collectives, and the platform will also support other kinds of collectives like educational, professional, and philanthropic collectives in the future.
As a diaspora member, an individual can join as many collectives as he or she chooses on Borderless. The person can create co-investment collectives to pool funds and invest back home in an organised manner.
These collectives can span multiple asset classes like venture capital, debt capital, real estate, media and entertainment, and sports. In the coming days, diaspora members will also be able to create other types of collectives like educational, professional, and philanthropic collectives.
“Collective managers can create their own private or public collectives, invite members, manage discussions, organise events, collect membership fees, share opportunities, and track collective growth metrics. Collective members can search, find, and discover collectives to be a part of. They can invest with these collectives easily, connect, and build relationships with other members of the collectives they join,” the start-up remarked.
Borderless earns revenue through transaction fees as well as a cut of membership dues and FX spreads. In the coming days, the start-up may layer on remittance products, payout fees, and asset management tools. For Joe Kinvi, the “bigger opportunity” lies in unlocking the USD 30 billion in migrant savings that sit idle every year. While remittance platforms like Zepz, Taptap Send, LemFi, and NALA dominate the space of taking some of that money back home, few have built for long-term investing.
Borderless’ backers include DFS Lab, Ezra Olubi (Paystack CTO), Olumide Soyombo, and executives from Stripe, Google, among others. Many of them have even become users of the platform. Kinvi wants to transform Borderless (which has raised USD 500,000 in investments so far) into something as much about identity as returns.
“Most Africans in the diaspora want to go back home someday. To do that, they need a way to invest securely and confidently at scale. That’s what we’re building,” he added.
Borderless’ current business model relies heavily on pre-existing relationships and known collective heads. The venture has been regulated by the British Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to ensure secure fund management and compliance.
Apart from leveraging regulated financial institutions for all transaction processing, the start-up is using encryption to protect user data and transactions. As it grows, it will need robust identity verification, fraud detection, and legal tooling to avoid becoming a target for cybercriminals.
Image Credits: Borderless