Greg Cooke, Co-Founder of Rafiki, builds a cross-border payment operating system for fractional workforces using stablecoin infrastructure to solve the currency volatility challenges of managing global talent teams. Originally from Cape Town with a performance marketing background, Greg moved to London where he evolved Rafiki from a freelance marketplace for African software engineers into a comprehensive SaaS platform addressing the fundamental shift from fixed salary workflows to variable payments based on hours, days, or weeks as companies increasingly adopt contingent labor strategies. He identifies the perfect storm driving fractional talent adoption: companies seeking agility and cost-effectiveness, younger generations demanding autonomy, rapid technological change creating demand for niche AI skills, and the 260% increase in large US companies hiring freelancers over the past two years, necessitating new payment infrastructure designed for this new way of work rather than traditional salary-based systems. Rafiki leverages USDC stablecoin infrastructure to enable five-second cross-border payments with minimal fees, building on global adoption signals from Stripe's bridge acquisition, Shopify's crypto integration, and PayPal's 100+ cryptocurrency support, while observing that stablecoins comprise 46% of all cryptocurrency transactions across Africa where mobile payment adoption creates natural blockchain integration pathways. The platform combines payment rails with curated talent access, embedding senior African freelancers and micro-agencies (70% South African-based) directly into the OS to create a "one-stop shop for talent requirements including invoicing, payments, and compliance," functioning like a curated Fiverr with integrated payment infrastructure rather than offline transaction handling. Greg raises a £500K pre-seed round at £2.5M valuation supported by Baobab Network (Africa-UK corridor expertise), JobTech Alliance (equity-free grant focused on job creation), and CV Labs (Web3 guidance), while building toward V2 invoicing logic and Slack/WhatsApp integrations that enable billing workflows through familiar chat interfaces, expanding from the UK-Africa corridor toward US-LATAM markets leveraging similar cross-border hiring arbitrage opportunities.