Quick take:
Reap has announced the completion of a $40 million funding round co-led by US-based venture capital firms Acorn Pacific Ventures and Arcadia Funds, and Hong Kong digital asset manager HashKey Capital.
The fundraising also attracted participation from Payment Asia, another fintech based in Hong Kong, as well as, U.S. venture capital firms Hustle Fund and Fresco Capital, among others.
According to the statement released on Thursday, Reap said it plans to use the funds to expand throughout Asia, North America and Europe. The company wants to double its team, which currently stands at about 40 staff members, by the end of 2023.
Reap new fundraising will also be used to accelerate the development of its web3 payments infrastructure.
The company was founded in 2018 to offer a comprehensive financial management service to businesses. However, so far, it has been able to offer services related to online invoicing and credit card payments, launched in partnership with Visa. The company has long-term goals of offering services in payroll and procurement.
More recently Reap has forayed into the blockchain and crypto space to allow companies to repay credit card balances with stablecoins. This opens more opportunities for the Hong Kong-based startup including the ability to provide on-rump and off-rump services to mainstream businesses.
On-rump services allow users to convert fiat currency to crypto, while off-rump is the opposite.
Commenting on the fundraising and plans to develop an infrastructure for crypto payments, Daren Guo, cofounder of Reap said the company wants to build “software and tools to enable more traditional businesses to get to payment digitalization faster.”
“At the same time, we want to enable access and connectivity for Web3 projects to ensure that they can continue to innovate and bring a lot of their ideas and creativity to apply for some of these more traditional companies,” added Guo.
Reap mission is to help provide cryptocurrency firms access to traditional merchants and physical services.
Reap is used by some of the biggest web3 companies including CZ’s Binance and Yat Siu’s Animoca Brands, among others. It has also tapped some customers from the mainstream including Taiwanese computing giant Acer.
Although the crypto payments feature is still in the trial stages, Guo hopes that the feature will in the long run be able to cover services covered by a credit card.
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