A Conversation With Usman Balogun, Co-Founder Of Cardtonic And US50 2026 Judge

Tell us about yourself and your role in the startup landscape

I am Usman Balogun, co-founder of Cardtonic and Managing Director of Breet. My background is finance and operations. I built the treasury, the unit economics, and the operational systems that let Cardtonic scale from a small bootstrapped business into a platform that has processed over ₦100 billion. I think about startups the way a CFO does: what does it cost to serve a customer, what do they pay, and does that gap hold as you grow? My role in the landscape sits on the operating and financial side of building, the part that decides whether a good idea becomes a durable business.

Having co-founded Cardtonic and helped grow it from a gift card trading platform into a broader fintech business, what lessons from that journey most influence how you evaluate startups today?

Cardtonic taught me that a business either works on the numbers or it does not, and no amount of story fixes bad unit economics. We grew the company into what it is by watching margins, reinvesting revenue, and refusing to spend money we had not earned. So when I evaluate a startup, I go straight to the economics: what it costs to acquire and serve a user, and whether that improves with scale. The other lesson is resilience. We built redundancy into everything critical so no single failure could stop us, and I look for that same operational seriousness in founders.

What makes the United States’ startup landscape different from other parts of the world?

Infrastructure and capital maturity. In the US, the plumbing of building a company already exists: payment rails, banking partners, legal templates, investors who understand risk. A founder can plug into all of it and focus on the product. In markets like ours, you often build that infrastructure yourself before you can even start. The US also has patient capital that will back a company through years of losses toward a big outcome, which allows a kind of long-horizon building that is rare elsewhere.

What advantages do startups based in the USA have over startups located elsewhere?

Capital and a single deep market. US founders raise at every stage from investors who have done it many times, and they sell into one large market with shared currency, language, and payment systems. That means faster validation and easier scaling within one set of rules. They also inherit a mature financial and regulatory system, so the things we spend enormous energy solving, like reliable payments and compliance, arrive closer to solved. That lets them put more energy into the product itself.

What challenges do startups based in the USA face compared to startups from other parts of the world?

High costs sitting next to easy money. Talent, customer acquisition, and operations all cost more in the US, and abundant funding can mask weak fundamentals. I have seen the discipline that comes from scarcity produce stronger businesses, and many US founders never get that forced education. When capital is easy, you can postpone the hard questions about margins and retention for years. In a tighter market, those questions get answered in month one, because they have to be.

As a founder who has built solutions around payments and financial access, what do you find most exciting about the US startup ecosystem right now?

The payments and fintech infrastructure layer. Stablecoins are moving into real settlement use, embedded finance is putting financial products inside every kind of software, and the rails are getting faster and more programmable. This is the world I work in, so I watch it closely. What excites me is that much of this US infrastructure will eventually make cross-border financial access easier for the rest of the world, including the markets we serve. The US often builds the rails everyone else later runs on.

What are you looking forward to seeing in US50 entries?

Businesses, not just products. I want to see founders who can show a clean model: what they charge, what it costs, and why that improves as they grow. I am drawn to teams solving a real, specific problem for a customer who clearly wants it, with evidence of paying users rather than sign-ups. Operational maturity matters to me too. Even at an early stage, some founders show they understand how their business actually runs, and that always stands out.

When reviewing applications, what qualities immediately tell you that a startup has the potential to scale successfully?

Healthy unit economics and operational discipline. If the cost to serve a customer falls as volume rises, and customers stay and spend more over time, the business can scale without collapsing under its own weight. I also watch how the founder handles the unglamorous parts: cash management, reliability, redundancy, the systems that keep a company standing when something breaks. Scale exposes weak operations fast. The startups that make it usually had that discipline before they needed it.

What can US50 entrants do to stand out from the crowd?

Show the economics clearly and honestly. Most founders pitch growth; fewer can explain why their business makes sense at the unit level, and that is what earns my attention. Bring real numbers, know your margins, and be straight about what is working and what is not. A founder who understands their own model deeply, and can defend it under questions, signals a business built to last rather than one that just looks good in launch week.

You’ve built a company by identifying a real-world problem and creating a practical solution. What’s your biggest piece of advice for founders entering the competition this year?

Solve a real problem, and make sure the business behind the solution works. It is not enough to build something people like. You need a model where serving them makes money as you grow. We built Cardtonic by finding a genuine problem, dollar access for everyday people, and turning it into a service that paid for itself from early on. Start from a real need, charge for the value you create, and keep your economics honest. A useful product on a sound model is what survives.