Ramp, a London-based company that aims to open up digital assets to more businesses and users, has secured $10.1 million (approx £7.1 million) funding in a Seed Round led by NfX with Galaxy Digital.
Other investors including, Seedcamp, firstminute capital and Fabric Ventures, as well as Mozilla, plus notable business angels associated with Coinbase (Balaji S. Srinivasan), Wise (Taavet Hinrikus), Dapper Labs (Roham Gharegozlou), IKEA (Bartek Pucek), and more entrepreneurs and executives from fintech and crypto industries, also participated.
The company plans to use the fund to triple the team by the end of 2021, set up headquarters in new regions, and develop the platform further.
“Crypto is one of the most promising technological frontiers for advancing finance and payments. For years, however, the industry was focused on speculation, creating products like crypto exchanges. Unlocking crypto’s use cases seemed like an afterthought. Now we feel it’s time for the industry to start delivering useful applications, and Ramp is here to make the mainstream transition to crypto much easier.” said Ramp co-founder and CEO Szymon Sypniewicz.
The funding round comes three years after Ramp raised $1.2M (approx €1M) in 2018 in a pre-seed round from a collective of funds and business angels.
What Ramp does?
Founded by Szymon Sypniewicz and Przemek Kowalczyk in 2017, Ramp is a full-stack payment infrastructure for crypto assets.
Meaning, through its SDK (Software Development Kit), any brand or partner who wants to offer crypto-enabled apps or services as part of their business model can do it securely.
In this case, the brand or partner doesn’t need any certifications and licences, since Ramp is the one that facilitates the transaction for the end-users.
PayPal for crypto?
Just like how PayPal revolutionised e-commerce and online payments by allowing any website, app, or service to embed payment infrastructure into their existing systems, Ramp aims to have the same impact on crypto assets.
“We built Ramp to unlock crypto’s power to completely revolutionise how we think about money and digital services for everyone, not just a handful of crypto-natives. We’re excited to see how crypto revolutionises the creative industry through NFTs, democratises finance through DeFi, and helps rethink how we do payments.” Przemek Kowalczyk, Ramp co-founder and CTO added.
The company has registered as a cryptoasset business with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and open banking business with The Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF).
Partnered with 200 developers
Ramp has already partnered with more than 200 developers, including Mozilla, Opera Labs, Dapper Labs (the company behind the NBA Top Shot and the new Flow blockchain), Sorare, and top crypto and DeFi apps Aave, Argent, and Zerion.
Ramp says it could help facilitate crypto transactions for banks’ or other financial institutions’ end-users within their banking apps.
At present, the use cases range from enabling users of Opera browser to top-up crypto wallets from within the app, up to players being able to play the Sorare NFT game and buy and sell virtual players via Ethereum.
Investors comments
“Ramp dramatically reduces the crypto barrier to entry for both non-crypto-native users and non-crypto native developers. We see Ramp, therefore, helping to accelerate crypto adoption through enabling mainstream use cases meaningfully,” said Morgan Beller, General Partner at NfX.
“Ramp lets developers onboard their users into a crypto app in a way that feels native to the app, and we’re convinced this is what the future of on-ramping looks like. We’re active users of crypto-based apps, and it was our own experience that showed us that apps using Ramp offered a game-changing improvement to the user experience,” said Jon Kol, who co-leads Galaxy’s Venture investments