Merge
Financial infrastructure for the crypto ecosystem
Funding stage: Pre-seed
What Merge does
Merge is building financial infrastructure that connects the crypto world to traditional finance. Even crypto companies need to exist in the real world, but find it extremely hard to access reliable modern financial infrastructure and services.
Existing providers aren’t typically incentivised to build the systems required to onboard and serve companies in the space, or to dedicate the resource to understanding crypto risk and compliance.
Merge seeks to solve this problem, which prevents so many innovative crypto companies from helping customers and fulfilling their potential. It aims to become a new infrastructure standard by offering basic financial tools such as business accounts, client accounts, transfers and conversion to companies in the crypto space.
Why we like it
The fintech technology stack has unbundled rapidly in the last five years, with the rise of players offering infrastructure to allow other companies to build services more quickly. The crypto ecosystem could lead to significant innovation, however, as crypto becomes mainstream it’s becoming increasingly clear that existing financial infrastructure is not fit for purpose.
Even when a crypto company manages to onboard with a traditional provider, they find it hard to trust that they will remain friendly, and there are concerns that the service could shut down at any time by either the regulator, or a third party’s risk department that doesn’t understand crypto.
By providing a robust and trusted platform, Merge could enable an entire generation of crypto companies to establish and thrive in their industry.
What our fund managers say
“In traditional finance, we’ve seen multiple billion-dollar businesses built in the banking as a service (BaaS) space. This BaaS space is emerging in the crypto sector and we believe that the team at Merge is well positioned to take a market superiority.”
– Zihao Xu, Principal
Who are we backing?
Kebbie Sebastian – CEO. Kebbie has a passion for solving the problems crypto companies face, with an entire career in fintech behind him. He was the Financial Products Director at Paypal before founding Penser, a payments and fintech consulting firm that has worked with the likes of Google and Stripe.
Michael Burtscher – COO. Michael led compliance for Coinbase in Europe. He’s currently one of twelve certified Visa auditors globally.
Jacques Van Niekerk – CEO. Jacques currently runs his own tech DD shop, and has previously held positions at Prodigy Finance, click2share and Naspers.
See more on Merge’s website here.