ANNOUNCEMENT — March 17, 2022
https://ponto.org/announcements/seed
Global payments startup Ponto has completed a $20m seed financing co-led by U.S. venture capital firms General Catalyst, Polychain, and NOMO VC. Firms from across the U.S. and abroad such as LocalGlobe, 186 Ventures, 468 Capital, BoxGroup, EchoVC, 6th Man, Flori, Alchemy, TABLE Management, Fintech Fund, and Chapter One also participated.
In order to support neobanks, wallets, and mobile financial experiences being built around the world, Ponto provides regulatory infrastructure and APIs for developers building global banking and payments products on top of decentralized finance. By streamlining settlement, liquidity, compliance, and risk management, Ponto’s bank-grade solution enables borderless asset interoperability across blockchains and local currencies.
With investment from senior leaders at global financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Citi, Ponto helps banks, telecoms, marketplaces, and wallets engage with decentralized finance. Ponto provides automatic compliance and risk controls to support secure, realtime banking on top of crypto.
Founded by Will Haering, Claudio Cornali, and Tim Moreton, the 24-person team brings expertise in software infrastructure, blockchain technology, foreign exchange, and derivatives.
The company is focused on a regulatory-first approach to supporting the global cryptocurrency ecosystem and is advised by top legal experts such as Jai Ramaswamy (U.S. Department of Justice, Celo, and Andreessen Horowitz) and Josh Kaplan (Checkout.com and Wilson Sonsini).
Co-founder Will Haering shares that Ponto is first launching support for the United States and Europe with a variety of clients that have been waiting for a robust on and off ramp between crypto and fiat, including neobanks, wallets, business payment tools, and NFT platforms.
“We’re building the infrastructure layer needed to support the most advanced financial system on Earth. Ponto is doing the work that is technically difficult and operationally intensive for businesses providing great consumer experiences in crypto,” stated Haering. “This makes Ponto the obvious choice for partners and their users.”
“By bridging centralized and decentralized financial ecosystems, Ponto’s infrastructure will play an integral role helping businesses provide their customers with frictionless access to crypto assets,” said Claudio Cornali, Ponto co-founder and Chief Financial Officer. “We’re excited to be the technological, compliance, and partnership infrastructure that’s needed not just in the U.S. and Europe, but also in emerging economies everywhere.”
Haering and Cornali, who first met discussing novel ways to increase cryptocurrency liquidity, hinted that pricing will be incredibly disruptive.
“In order to build this infrastructure at global scale, we’ve assembled a team of world-class distributed systems engineers, financial engineers, and payments experts,” says Ponto CTO Oliver Bates, who previously led infrastructure teams at Stripe and Apple. Joined by payments rockstars Chuck Kimble (Visa, Square, Circle, Celo) and Gene Yoshida (Revolut, Prosper Marketplace, SVB), the team will use the funding to expand its trading systems and headcount in order to handle the scale of demand for the young company’s product.