Lipa Later

» see lipalater.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the first time i heard the name lipa later was when the ralph queue pulled the shutdown notice in march 2025. bnpl as a category has plenty of turkish equivalents (colendi and popcredi on the fintech side, various bank-attached instalment products on the incumbent side) but the east african bnpl story is its own thing, built around different retail patterns and different smartphone-adoption timelines. lipa later belongs to that story, not to the story i can speak to from ankara.

eric muli founded lipa later in nairobi in 2018. the pitch was consumer credit at the point of sale, first through partnerships with kenyan merchants like carrefour and jumia, later extending to a merchant sdk that any online seller could plug in. by 2022 the company had raised a $12 million seed round and expanded operations into uganda, rwanda, nigeria and south africa. late 2024 brought another $10 million in a mixed debt-and-equity injection. the announced ambition was to be the pan-african bnpl leader.

the december 2023 acquisition of sky.garden marked the shift toward an e-commerce ecosystem play. sky.garden had been a small-merchant marketplace in kenya, and lipa later paid kes 250 million (~$1.9 million) to fold it in as a distribution channel for the bnpl product. the plan was to rebuild sky.garden as an integrated buy-now-pay-later marketplace. that rebuild was underway when the 2024 funding round the company had been counting on failed to close.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

by q4 2024 lipa later had stopped paying salaries and had fallen behind on supplier invoices. one court judgment in december 2024 required payment of a $13,516 outstanding debt to africa foresight group, a small sum that made the news because a company that had raised $22 million was unable to pay it. inside kenyan tech coverage the pattern was familiar: the post-zirp capital drought that had already claimed twiga foods and kune foods was now moving through the fintech tier.

in march 2024 lipa later had also filed a trade-secrets lawsuit against a former head of partner success who had joined competitor craft silicon kenya. the court dismissed the injunction application citing insufficient evidence, but the lawsuit itself signaled a management under stress about staff departures. by early 2025 the departures were accelerating and the runway had run out.

~ the postmortem ~

lipa later was placed under administration on 24 march 2025. joy vipinchandra bhatt of moore jvb consulting was appointed administrator. bhatt gave creditors a deadline of 23 april 2025 to submit claims. the administration process is not a liquidation. it is a formal restructuring that could in principle produce a buyer for the business or an orderly wind-down.

in practice by mid-2025 the operational business had halted. merchants stopped accepting lipa later as a payment method, the consumer app was uninstalled by most active users, and the sky.garden domain went quiet. no acquirer stepped forward for the bnpl platform itself. the reasonable read of the administration is that it functioned as a wind-down rather than a rescue.

~ the long tail ~

lipa later leaves the african bnpl story with one of its most-funded early entrants gone. the wider pattern (fintechs raising during 2021 to 2022 at revenue multiples that assumed unlimited follow-on capital) has now cycled through africa the way it cycled through india and the us. the kenyan-specific version of the story adds a layer: retail partners like carrefour that had integrated lipa later at point of sale had to pull the option quietly, and small merchants on the acquired sky.garden marketplace lost their storefronts without much notice. the shutdown lands hardest on those merchants rather than on the funded investors.

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