The platform that powers $40M in cross-border B2B payments.
Twelve weeks from kickoff to launch. Brand, design system, and a full-stack payments platform — one senior team, one shipping calendar.
Helios moves money between African and European businesses. When they came to us they were clearing real volume on spreadsheets, email, and trust — with no platform, no brand banks recognised, and a funding milestone on the calendar.
Build a payments platform that could clear real money with full reconciliation and audit trails, plus a brand credible enough to open conversations with banks — and ship both inside a single quarter, before the raise.
One workstream, not three
Strategy, identity, product design, and engineering ran as a single workstream from day one. No handoffs, no translation loss — the people who set the positioning also shipped the production code.
A reconciliation-first core
The payments engine was built for auditability before features — every movement traceable, every balance reconcilable. Compliance was a foundation, not a retrofit, so the platform could face a bank on its first day.
Brand and product from one source
A tokenised design system kept the marketing site and the product visually identical and independently shippable — change a token once, and brand and app move together.
$40M cleared in the first year — on a platform built in twelve weeks.
Helios launched on schedule and cleared $40M in cross-border volume in its first year, on a platform scoring 98 on Lighthouse. The brand still anchors their investor and customer story today.
“CODIANT shipped a brand and a platform we still feel proud of three years on. That’s the rarest thing in this industry.
