Hussain Elius is best known as the co-founder of Pathao, one of Bangladesh’s leading ridesharing apps. For his latest startup, however, Elius is exploring the world of DeFi with Wind.app, a self-service smart contract wallet with three main features. The former enables businesses to send payments to remote employees around the world. The second allows users to use Wind.app as a virtual bank account. And the third is the on-ramp/off-ramp infrastructure that the company is building to allow users to exchange their cryptocurrencies for fiat or vice versa.
So far, Wind.app has facilitated over $3 million in annual gross transaction volume (GTV) within months of its launch. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by Global Founders Capital and Spartan Group, with backers including Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures and Tiny VC.
By the time Elius left Pathao, it had become one of the most dominant consumer technology companies in Bangladesh and Nepal, offering food delivery, payments and BNPL, in addition to ridesharing, and winning investment from backers such as Gojek. During the COVID pandemic, Elius began to explore cryptography. But he realized how difficult it is to use it for people who, unlike him, have no technological background.
“I’m a tech-savvy person. If it takes me seven to 10 days to figure out things like MetaMask, gas fees, private keys, public keys, and mnemonics, coming from a consumer tech background and working in crypto, I realized that crypto is still for nerds,” he said. he said.
Elius decided to create an app accessible to people with minimal blockchain and crypto experience. First, users don’t have to deal with gas fees. And they also store their money in stablecoins, since bitcoin is very volatile. Instead of using private or public keys, users can register with Wind.app with their emails or phone numbers.
The Wind.app team. Image Credits: Wind.app
Wind.app is starting by targeting freelancers and remote workers for payments, especially in Southeast Asia. It is live in the Philippines, India and Bangladesh and plans to enter more countries. Many of its early customers are other web3 startups. “It’s easy to take our value proposition to other web3 companies because they get it from day one,” said Elius. Wind.app allows them to use it instead of a high-fee exchange to pay their remote workers.
Elius says Wind.app differentiates itself from Wise or Payoneer because it uses blockchain for settlement and is able to charge lower fees. Another advantage is being able to open an account quickly because the Wind.app wallet does not require advanced KYC.
“Ultimately, we want to go down the ladder and target the unbanked segment, who don’t have that much KYC information anyway, to give them a very easy way to start accepting money,” says Elius .
While Wind.app has users all over the world, it started in Southeast Asia—specifically the Philippines—because there is a very large USD remittance market there. Elius says the country is also very crypto-savvy and many people are familiar with crypto.
“I’ve been to the Philippines a few times and even some of the tuk-tuk drivers have encryption,” he says. “They hold them some bitcoin. So it’s both a remittance market and a big crypto market, which makes it a good first market to start with.”
A feature that may make Wind.app attractive to consumers is that it has created its own offramp and onramp for fiat and crypto coins.
“The reason we did this was because initially we tried to use different partners and we saw that it was quite expensive,” Elius said. “Any other on-ramps and off-ramps charge 2% to 3%, which is a lot, especially if it’s a dividend. That’s how we do ours and have reduced the cost to less than 30 bips or so. And now we’ve started offering it to other businesses and other money-trafficking businesses.”
Some companies in the same space as Wind.app include Binance and Coinbase, but Elius says he doesn’t see them as competitors because people use them mostly for trading. Instead, more direct competitors include Payoneer and TransferWise. “We’re coming in and saying hey, you know we’re different because our whole technology is different, our regulatory edge is different,” Elius said.
In terms of user security, Wind.app is a custodial wallet, meaning the startup has no access or control over user funds, Elius says. Similar to the Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask or Trust Wallet, the wallets are cryptographically secured on the blockchain and their private keys are stored directly on users’ phones. If Wind.app is shut down, users would still have access to their wallets and be able to transfer funds to other wallets.
Wind.apps new funding will be used for technology development and licensing and compliance as it builds and scales. Part of it will also be used for the startup’s customer acquisition strategy, including direct outreach to businesses and individual users.
