FPV and slow venture-backed payments Fintech Astra raises $10 million

• Astra helps businesses execute and settle payments faster through built-in APIs.
• The startup raised $10 million in Series A funding led by FPV and Slow Ventures.
• Following this funding round, Astra plans to increase access to its technology to later start-up phases.

Astra, a fintech startup that has developed technology to allow developers to embed financial automation into existing products, raised a $10 million Series A along with a $30 million line of credit.

FPV Ventures, the firm founded by former Google product manager Wesley Chan and Morgan Stanley alum Pegah Ebrahimi, led the Series A round with participation from Slow Ventures and Allegis Capital. CoVenture offered the $30 million line of credit.

Astra’s application programming interface, or API, makes it faster for businesses to add a payment layer to their business and offers faster and more secure bank-to-bank transfers. It partnered with companies like Plaid and Visa to power some of its services.

Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan started the company in 2016 and took several years to perfect their bank-to-bank transfer solution. It launched its card payment API in 2021.

Akos, Astra’s chief executive, said the drive to raise capital came after the card-to-card instant payment solution “broke”.

“We saw a lot of new customers coming in, so at the beginning of the summer we saw massive growth and payment volume,” Akos said. “Everything was going very, very fast and very big, so we said, why not drive this growth.”

Astra plans to expand its engineering and compliance services, including expanding the company from the seven that worked for Astra pre-Series A funding. Akos said the funding, and in particular the line of credit it received from CoVenture, will be used to expand instant payment services to fintechs in areas such as lending, investment and freight forwarding and factoring, and other B2B segments.

The B2B payment area has seen some growth in recent months. For example, B2B payments company Hopscotch recently raised $6.1 million in additional funding in March.

Some of Astra’s clients include challenger banks Fold and Daylight, and spending app Tandem. Akos said one of Astra’s goals is to move exclusively and start offering payment services to later-stage startups. Akos also said they are seeing interest from companies in the shipping segment that tend to be in the later stages when they realize they have a payments pain point.

“We’re ready for the big time when it comes to bigger customers and bigger volumes because we’ve done all this lead work upfront, established the right partners across the board, and we’re ready to fire,” Akos said.