EchoVC is pleased to announce its investment in Ponto – a global payments startup providing APIs and regulatory infrastructure to link the decentralized and centralized worlds such that neobanks, fintechs, and enterprises can harness crypto and DeFi for innovative and elastic banking and payment capabilities.
While linkages across different financial systems in the centralized world are still being built, the decentralized world suffers from difficult, slow, and inadequate connections into these centralized ecosystems of mobile money, bank money, bank cards, and cash.
Ponto is building the infrastructure layer to provide seamless connectivity between decentralized finance and centralized finance ecosystems, and with a regulatory-first approach – Ponto will also provide automated compliance and risk controls to support their infrastructure layer.
While we have not fully disclosed our blockchain-focused investment strategy quite yet, suffice to say, we have been actively developing our theses for quite a few years and one key element is what we are calling ‘translation infrastructure,’ which Ponto (and FonBnk) strongly illustrate. We consider companies building and deploying this infrastructure fundamentally important to ensuring that the Web3 economy serves, includes and empowers the 99%.
We are thrilled with the potential that Ponto brings, and their global ambition to optimize payment channels and enable the abstraction of DeFi functionality into the real world. From Africa’s perspective, we believe blockchains will unlock new opportunity sets on the continent ranging from innovative wallets, to efficient cross-border payments, treasury optimization, micro-credit, interest access, affordable investments through fractionalization, decentralized neobanks, new-age creator economies, and the emergence of social collectives built as DAOs. Africa represents fertile ground to develop a federated cross-border economy built on portable and fractionalized systems of identity, infrastructure, reputation, security and trust.
We look forward to partnering with Ponto on this exciting journey. This transaction represents EchoVC’s second publicly disclosed investment in the blockchain sector, following our investment in Fonbnk, a startup enabling users across Africa to access DeFi through airtime. We continue to seek and support the upside of blockchain in Africa, and look forward to welcoming more startups to our portfolio through our upcoming blockchain-and Web3-dedicated fund: EchoVC Chain.