Nigerian crypto and web3 company Lazerpay has shut down its operations following its inability to secure additional funding to keep the company afloat.
Lazerpay CEO and founder Njoku Emmanuel revealed that the painful decision was taken after the company fought hard to keep it running but unfortunately, the effort wasn’t enough.
In a tweet on Thursday, April 13, 2023, he wrote,
“Today, we announce the difficult decision to cease operations at Lazerpay. Despite our team’s tireless efforts to secure the necessary funding to keep Lazerpay going, we were unable to close a successful fundraising round. We fought hard to keep the lights on as long as possible but unfortunately, we are now at a point where we need to shut down.
“As we sunset Lazerpay, we remain committed to helping our users transition smoothly and to ensuring that only outstanding matters are resolved. Merchants are advised to withdraw their funds from the platform before the 30th of April 2023, using the Bank or Crypto payout option. We encourage our community to stay in touch and reach out to us as the team will be available to answer any questions or concerns”.
He further disclosed that Lazerpay is open to offers from companies who are interested in purchasing the company’s IP.
Before Lazerpay took the final decision to shut down operations, Investors King understands that in November 2022, the company battled with some financial crisis after a proposed lead investor pulled out resources abruptly earlier in 2022 which forced it to lay part of its workforce.
It is interesting to note that one of Lazerpay’s strong partners and investors Nestcoin, was impacted by the FTX collapse after the CEO Yele Bademosi disclosed that the startup had a significant portion of its stablecoin investment held in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange. This spurred Nestcoin to lay off a significant part of its workforce.
Launched in 2021, Lazerpay has been committed to driving crypto adoption globally. Since its operation, the startup enabled over 3,000 businesses to accept payments in stablecoins all over the world. It also improved its core payments gateway and added off-ramp features to help merchants convert their crypto to fiat directly into their bank accounts in over 100 countries.