Blockchain Payments Platform Ansible Labs Raises $7 Million in Seed Funding Round
Ansible Labs, a startup building a blockchain account payment platform, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by early-stage crypto venture capital firm Archetype.
The capital will go toward hiring, liquidity and operating expenses before launching the project’s first product, according to a fundraising deck provided to CoinDesk.
“We see the off-ramp as a missing piece in the puzzle that is mainstream Web3 adoption and use,” Ansible Labs co-founder and CEO Daniel Mottice told CoinDesk in an email.
The Ansible team has ties to global payments provider Visa, Mottice was product manager for Visa Crypto and helped build and launch Visa Direct Payouts, a service that allows financial institutions to push payments to accounts worldwide. Ansible co-founder and Chief Product Officer Matt Vanhouten also worked at Visa Direct and has a background in traditional finance with stints at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan & Chase.
“We are ecstatic to support Dan and the Ansible team in building a pillar company at the intersection of fintech and crypto,” said Ash Egan, a general partner at Archetype. “Ansible solves a critical need that only increases in importance as more companies come on board and the creator economy in Web3 hits its stride.”
Other participants in the funding round include Castle Island Ventures, A* Partners, Arca, Soma Capital, Plural VC and Eniac Ventures.
The Web3 onboarding process, also called an “on-ramp,” requires a user to set up a cryptocurrency wallet and send fiat currency to that wallet to purchase the crypto needed to interact with non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces . , decentralized finance platforms (DeFi) and other blockchain-based programs.
Withdrawing the crypto back to fiat is called an exit. While both on-boarding and off-boarding processes come with technical and regulatory complexities, Ansible Labs sees off-boarding as an underserved market.
“We see the off-ramp as an important primitive that will enable Web3 companies, creators, artists, DAO contributors, and developers to more seamlessly explore and use Web3 without the headache of figuring out how to cash out their chain value to fiat when they need to accelerate real-world value,” Mottice said.
The first product from Ansible Labs is Beam, an off-ramp product with multi-chain support for non-custodial wallets that can be used directly through a Web3 app with banking-class compliance. Beam will be released this fall, and Ansible then plans to expand the capabilities of the product so that Web3 companies can directly integrate the customizable off-ramp product into their products
Read more: Custodial wallets vs. non-custodial crypto wallets
“The theme of programmable money need not only apply to crypto, and with seamless value transfer, fluidity and configurability between fiat and crypto, we believe crypto payments can realize their full potential,” Mottice said.
