Ramp raises $10.1M to make crypto useful and accessible

Our Seed round was led by NFX and Galaxy Digital, with the participation of some of the best fintech and crypto entrepreneurs and funds. Together, we are building a future where crypto becomes genuinely useful, for all.

The first waves of crypto adoption were all about speculating on asset prices, but the technology promises so much more. Crypto was supposed to democratise financial markets and change entire industries.

With our latest funding and with the rise of NFTs and DeFi apps, we feel that the blockchain space is now finally moving from the speculation phase into the usage phase, where crypto can unleash its full potential and show its actual value. We are shifting from buying crypto to using crypto.

To get to the point where every digital product is crypto-enabled and utilises NFTs, governance tokens, crypto payments, and loyalty programs, we need to address the lack of good bridges to blockchains. Today, all new users in the crypto space are forced to switch back and forth between exchanges, wallets, and crypto-enabled apps. As a result, the UX is subpar, transactions are expensive, and mainstream users who have no prior experience with crypto are put off.

Ramp is here to build these bridges. Our mission is to make using crypto apps easier than e-commerce. We've been working with more than 200 partners (and counting) who share our vision of the decentralised future. As a result, a growing number of end-users can now take full advantage of having a single user account. An account that works with 200+ crypto-enabled products, without the need for endlessly repeated verifications, without suffering payment issues, and an account where they can use their fiat money to:

• top up their non-custodial wallets with dozens of crypto assets
• use DeFi apps in just a couple of taps
• easily and securely purchase NFTs
• and do much more across our partners’ apps!

The SDK for any use case

Ramp is your default gateway to crypto. It supports multiple assets, both on Layer 1 and Layer 2. It provides a convenient SDK that grants you global coverage and takes the regulatory burden off your shoulders. We combine multiple payment channels to provide outstanding UX, low usage costs, and easy access to your preferred payment method, from credit cards to Apple Pay to open banking transactions.

We’ve been excited to see how Ramp has already helped multiple partners in building next-level user onboarding flows for their products. Together with Sorare, we offer its fantasy football players the option to easily buy football collectibles based on NFTs with their cards. The Async.art marketplace improved their onboarding process and opened themselves up to crypto newbies, thanks to our streamlined process. Axie Infinity uses Ramp rails to let users directly purchase assets on its Ronin sidechain, thus escaping the high conversion costs associated with Layer 1 transactions.

Ramp is also used as a payment solution in DeFi dApps, including a leading decentralised finance aggregator, Zerion – dubbed the “neobank on crypto rails''. We have also been working with Celo and its flagship wallet, Valora, to make instant, carbon-neutral blockchain transfers easy for users in developing countries. And with Opera, to give users in selected countries easy access to crypto assets that can be later used in Web3 applications through Opera Browser. Will your dApp be next?

Looking ahead

With our recent funding we can work on even deeper integration with scalability solutions, including more Layer 2 projects; adding capacity to onboard large projects looking to harness crypto power for hundreds of millions of their users; and introducing more convenient ways to pay all across the world, including ACH in the USA, UPI in India, Pix in Brazil, and more open banking connectivity across continental Europe.

We are also excited to announce we are going to make our service available for even more use cases, including advanced Layer 2 capabilities and newly launched one-click NFT purchases.

This is possible because of the support from our investors, participating in either the recent $10.1 million funding round, or our $1.2 million pre-seed round, two years ago. We are happy to welcome NFX, Galaxy Digital, and Mozilla, who have joined us recently, and glad for the increased involvement from Seedcamp, firstminute capital, and Fabric Ventures, who participated in both rounds.

We are also grateful for the support of our business angels, including Balaji S. Srinivasan (former Coinbase CTO), Taavet Hinrikus (CEO & founder of Wise), Roham Gharengozlou (CEO & founder of Dapper Labs), Nicolas Julia (CEO & Co-Founder of Sorare), Itamar Lesuisse (CEO & founder of Argent), Francesco Simoneschi (CEO & Founder of TrueLayer), Charles Delingpole (CEO & Founder of ComplyAdvantage), Diogo Monica (CEO & Founder of Anchorage), and many more, whom we would like to thank for sharing our vision and believing in our approach.

Their support means we can radically accelerate our growth and open the infrastructure for partners serving billions of users.

It’s now time for us to scale our technology for upcoming launches with partners shipping crypto-enabled apps to their multi-million-users customer bases. Stay tuned for some major announcements by following our Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RampNetwork