Sequoia Spark’s Crypto payments startup Nume Crypto has raised $2 million in its pre-seed funding round from Sequoia Capital India with participation from BEENEXT, Whiteboard Capital, and other.
Many prominent angel investors like Jaynti Kanani (Co-founder of Polygon), Balaji Srinivasan ( Former CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at a16z), Gabby Dizon (Co-founder of Yield Guild Games), Rahul Rai (Co-Head of Market Neutral at BlockTower Capital), Sanat Rao (General Partner at BlockTower Capital), Arun Samudrala (Engineering Lead at Google), and Gautam Seshadri (Chief Business Officer of Blowhorn) also participated in the funding round.
The platform plans to use the funds to take the product to market in the next 2-3 months. In its first phase, the company will support five cryptos, including Ethereum.
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Nume Crypto was founded in November 2021 by sisters Madhumitha Harishankar and Niveda Harishankar, It is a zero-cost crypto payment gateway that processes cryptocurrency payments (ETH and ERC-20 tokens, to start) powered by its new L2 scaling protocol.
“What we’re building is a way for merchants to really cheaply accept cryptocurrency payments and for customers to be able to shop on the web. We’re focused on even more stable coins and popular cryptocurrencies because merchants have a huge concern regarding volatility and that’s something that we wanted to start addressing from the very first day,” said, Harishankar.
The very low throughput of the blockchain – Visa’s capacity of 65,000 transactions per second compared to Ethereum’s 30 transactions per second – leads to congestion and prohibitively high gas prices (the cost associated with verifying transactions on the blockchain).
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The company plans to charge a fixed commission of 1% and not pass on gas charges to the customers.
“Our protocol can shield any notion of gas costs. So when we say 1%, we can keep it at 1%. And that’s because, at scale, our cost actually doesn’t increase linearly with the number of transactions we do,” she added.
When launched later this year, Nume Crypto will offer two products-NumPay and NumPay Business.
These products are currently in the early stages of beta testing and a public launch is planned for the fourth quarter of this year.
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“Nume is aiming to make good on the original promise of cryptocurrency, which was to make it accessible for the masses as a payments platform. Their innovative approach and merchant-friendly business model immediately resonated with us and Sequoia Capital India is thrilled to lead their pre-seed fundraise”, said, Shailesh Lakhani, MD, Sequoia India.
“Team Nume brings a rare combination of deep crypto know how and real world execution capabilities to the table. They are building a 100x product benchmarked against status quo of crypto or payment rails wrt TPS, costs and overall efficiency,” said, Dirk van Quaquebeke, Managing Partner, BEENEXT.
About Nume Crypto
Nume Crypto is founded with the vision of enabling financial inclusivity at a global scale using cryptocurrency and blockchain based technologies.
Their mission is to enable easy access to the global economy through a borderless, trustless, and economical payments rail.
