Helio recently announced it raised $3.3 million in a seed round of funding in order to bring Web3 payments to the masses. The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs Jim Walker and Stijn Paumen with a goal of building a “Stripe” for the Web3 economy that makes integrating blockchain-native payments as simple as setting up a Gmail account. This funding round was led by Peak and Lightspeed Faction, with further participation from RockawayX, Solana Labs and a group of leading angel investors.
The company founders Jim and Stijn have worked together for 20 years building SaaS start-ups with 2 successful exits for a total of $600 million. And since launching in the summer of 2022, Helio processed over $10 million in e-commerce, NFT sales, SaaS subscriptions, content paywalls, and other payments for more than 900 merchant customers and 35,000 users. And Helio features in the top 50 DeFi apps across all blockchains, according to DappRadar.
Helio’s solution currently provides a secure and convenient way for merchants, dApps, and creators to accept instant crypto payments across multiple blockchains, including Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum. And the platform offers built-in content paywalling features that enables creators like podcasters, YouTubers, artists, NFT projects, media, or platforms to monetize content in a new way and reach a new audience with watch-to-earn models.
This funding round will be used to build out the sales and marketing teams to strike partnerships with creator platforms and marketplaces. And Helio will expand its engineering team to pursue the company’s multi-chain strategy with launches planned for Bitcoin, Binance, as well as deliver an in-app wallet to enable Web2-style payment experiences and integrations.
KEY QUOTES:
“Payments is the ultimate blockchain killer app, promising lower fees, instant settlement for merchants, and increased privacy & friction-free checkouts for users. Our goal is to bring these benefits to 100s of millions of users over time by lowering the barriers of using web3 technology and offering a familiar payment UX. We’re thrilled with the backing, which will allow us to execute on our roadmap, scale the platform and streamline onboarding new clients.”
– Stijn Paumen, CEO of Helio
“Digital payments is a +10T market with double-digit growth driven by emerging payment technologies such as blockchain payments. We believe a sizeable share of transactions will be executed on blockchains in the coming decade, creating a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity. Helio will be leading the way with their API and simple UI that makes it easy for anyone to integrate in minutes and process Web3 payments without any prior blockchain experience.”
– David Zwagemaker, Partner at Peak
“We were instantly excited by Helio’s focus on digital content as an emerging use case for Web3 payments. A crypto wallet can also act as a portable digital identity, meaning creators can eliminate sign-ups from their checkout flow. At the same time, users can instantly unlock and pay for content with a micropayment and a single tap of their wallet saving 2-3 minutes it would take to sign up and pay over traditional, expensive card rails. That level of friction is completely removed with Helio.”
– Sam Harrison, Managing Partner at Lightspeed Faction
