INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Fintech is white hot these days, with major acquisitions and funding rounds galore
world in the past few years.So it is fascinating to watch how Shamir Karkal, one of the original fintech entrepreneurs, is coming back for a
second round in this still-nascent industry.Karkal co-founded Portland-based Simple back in 2009, a company that was among the first of a
eventually selling the company to BBVA for $117 million in 2014
fintech was headed next.He eventually connected with three co-founders, Angela Angelovska, Isaac Hines and Alex Lipton and began thinking
about how to rebuild finance from the ground up, starting with the venerable but creaky payments system known as ACH
ideas first fleshed out decades ago.Together, their thinking eventually turned into Sila, which is a payments and banking API infrastructure
company designed to eventually supplant ACH as the payments choice for companies who need to move money
Sila follows the ERC-20 token protocol and is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain.The startup announced today a $7.7 million seed
more rapid deployment of financial applications.Karkal sees greater movement to online banking services, particularly given the outbreak of
novel coronavirus underway across the world right now
infrastructure in place, financial services have to solve for problems like individual and business identity verification.Cochran of Madrona
sees a huge opportunity for better payments solutions, given her former experience as a CFO of King Digital, the producer behind popular
mobile game Candy Crush, and Clearwire, a telecom operator
That was ultimately why the team decided to start with Ethereum as a base, rather than rolling their own solution
pricing model that might be attractive to certain customers is that the company has fixed, flat-rate pricing for all transactions
companies with better options around transaction volume than incumbent payment solutions.The company intends to use the venture funds to
focus on filling out more of its API offerings, as well as expanding its customer base
and 99 Tartans joined the round along with Transferwise co-founder and CEO Taavet Hinrikus and Jerry Neumann.
