Image credits: Tsunar Dorin / 500px /
Hussain Elius is best known as the co-founder of Pathao, one of Bangladesh’s top ride-hailing apps. But with his latest startup, Elius explores his DeFi world using his Wind.app, a self-custodial smart contract wallet with three key features: doing. The first is to allow businesses to send money to remote employees around the world. Second, it allows you to use Wind.app as a virtual bank account. And third is the on-ramp/off-ramp infrastructure that the company is building to allow users to change their crypto holdings into fiat currency and vice versa.
So far, Wind.app has generated over $3 million in annual gross transaction volume (GTV) within months of launch. The Singapore-based startup today announced that it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Global Founders Capital and Spartan Group, with participation from backers including Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Tiny VC. did.
By the time Elius left Pathao, the company had become one of the most dominant consumer technology companies in Bangladesh and Nepal, offering food delivery, payments, BNPL in addition to ride-sharing, and support from backers like Gojek. I was getting investment. During the coronavirus pandemic, Elius began exploring cryptocurrencies. However, he realized how difficult it was to use for people who, unlike himself, did not have a technical background.
“I” am a tech-savvy person. Even if it takes me 7-10 days to understand things like Metamask, gas fees, private keys, public keys, mnemonics, etc. Coming from a consumer technology background and getting into crypto, crypto is still a nerd. I found out that it’s for you. “Said.
Elius decided to build an app that was accessible to those with minimal experience with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. First, users don’t have to deal with gas fees. They also store their money in stablecoins because Bitcoin is too volatile. Instead of using private or public keys, users can sign up for her Wind.app using email or phone number.
Wind.app is starting by targeting payments to freelancers and remote workers, especially in Southeast Asia. It has been rolled out in the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh, with plans to enter more countries. Many of his early customers are other Web3 startups. “It’s easy to communicate our value proposition to other Web3 companies because they understand it from day one,” Elius says. Wind.app allows remote he to use Wind.app instead of exchanges which have high fees to pay workers.
Elius said Wind.app is different from Wise and Payoneer because it uses blockchain for payments and can charge lower fees. Another advantage is that Wind.app’s self-custodial wallet does not require advanced KYC, so you can open an account quickly.
“Ultimately, we want to go down the ladder and target the unbanked population who don’t have a lot of KYC information and give them a very easy way to start receiving money.” says Elius.
Wind.app has users all over the world, but we started in Southeast Asia, specifically the Philippines, because there is a very large remittance market for US dollars. According to Elius, the country is also very familiar with cryptocurrencies, and many people are familiar with them.
“I’ve been to the Philippines a few times and some of the tuk-tuk drivers owned cryptocurrencies,” he says. “They own Bitcoin. So this is both a remittance market and a large crypto market, making it a good market to start with.”
One of the features that makes Wind.app attractive to consumers is that it builds its own off-ramps and on-ramps for fiat and crypto coins.
“The reason we did that is because we initially tried using another partner and found it to be quite expensive,” Elius said. “Other on-ramp and off-ramp fees are 2% to 3%, which is high, especially for dividends. So we were able to uniquely bring the cost down to less than 30 pips. And now, We actually started offering it to other companies and other companies that were moving money around.”
Companies in the same space as Wind.app include Binance and Coinbase, but Elius said he doesn’t see them as competitors because people mainly use them for trading. Instead, more direct competitors include Payoneer and Transferwise. “We’re here to say we’re different because the whole technology stack is different and the regulatory benefits are different,” Elius said.
In terms of user safety, Wind.app is a self-custodial wallet, meaning the startup cannot access or control users’ funds, Ilius said. Similar to Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, and Trust Wallet, the wallet is cryptographically secured within the blockchain and the private keys are stored directly on the user’s mobile phone. Even if Wind.app is shut down, users can still access their wallets and transfer funds to other wallets.
Wind.apps’ new funding will be used to develop the technology and procure licenses and compliance to build and deploy it. Some of the money will also be used for startups’ customer acquisition strategies, such as directly reaching businesses and individual users.