Lightning Network Startup Neutronpay Raises $2.25M in Venture Capital To Transform Mainstream Payment Rails Starting With Vietnam and South East Asia
The Highlights:
- On June 1st 2022, Hivemind Ventures led a $2.25 million round in seed funding for Neutronpay, a startup based in both Vancouver and Saigon (Vietnam). Neutronpay builds itself on the Lightning Network, a Layer-2 payment protocol atop of Bitcoin, to enable consumers and businesses to send and receive payments with settlement time in milliseconds.
- The principal investor in the round was Hivemind Ventures. Bill Crowley, a former chief product officer of Hyperwallet (acquired by PayPal), and Lisa Shields, the company's founder and former CEO, were individual investors in addition to the venture capital firms Republic, Cavalry, Ride Wave, Studio, Iterative, and Fulgur Ventures.
- Since El Salvador introduced its national Bitcoin wallet in the fall of 2021, which included a Lightning integration to allow customers to make purchases at businesses throughout the country, the Lightning Network has experienced remarkable development.
The Lightning Network is a Layer-2 payment system that runs on top of Bitcoin and enables immediately-resolved payments measured in milliseconds. It can be considered the ultimate mobile banking of any kind, bar none. It is capable of millions of transactions per second at low costs. Globally, Lightning can replace all wire, debit, and credit transactions. Due to its interoperability, anybody with a Lightning-enabled app can send or spend money in local currency to any person or business anywhere around the globe. Lightning can handle everything, from online, offline, cross-border, micro, to real-time.
Hivemind Ventures served as the round's lead investor. Other investors included the venture capital firms Republic, Cavalry, Ride Wave, Studio, Iterative, Fulgur Ventures, and individual investors Bill Crowley, a former chief product officer at Hyperwallet, and Lisa Shields, the founder and former CEO at the same company (which was later acquired by PayPal).
The funding will be channeled into furthering the growth of enterprise APIs, soon-to-be-released mobile consumer apps, sales & marketing, and compliance. Additionally, it will help Neutronpay increase headcount in multiple departments.
Neutronpay, the first Lightning firm, was established in 2018 by CEO Albert Buu with a strong initial focus on Vietnam's 100 million population, with more South East Asian nations to follow.
With a population of 680 million, South East Asia's monetary and financial system has grown significantly over the past 20 years. However, 50% of the population remains unbanked and 70% has insufficient access, about 340 million people are still entirely excluded from digitalization.
Not stopping there, Neutron pay aims to support USD stablecoins by Q4 2022 and adds capability for users to send fast fiat payments while avoiding Bitcoin's volatility.
“Being born and raised in Canada, I’ve been lucky to be part of first-world financial infrastructure. But I knew that by going to Vietnam, where my parents and the rest of my family are from, I could make a difference by introducing them to the Lightning Network and all it could provide to the country's people. Making a move to Vietnam three years ago was my commitment to following through on this vision. Laying the infrastructure for Lightning across South East Asia would make it very easy for locals to better transact with each other and for the rest of the world to transact in the region whether while on vacation or for doing business” - Albert Buu, CEO of Neutropay.
Since El Salvador introduced its national Bitcoin wallet in the fall of 2021 with a Lightning integration, the Lightning Network has experienced remarkable growth with users capable of instantaneously spend at shops around the country. Twitter also adopted Lightning tipping, Cashapp introduced Lightning in January 2022, and Robinhood made a similar announcement in April. This makes sense, given that co-founders and CEOs Vald Tenev of Robinhood and Jack Dorsey of Twitter both invested early in Lightning Labs and have faith in the Lightning Network's future.
Adapted from: globenewswire.com