We are thrilled to announce that Spritz has secured $2.5 million in early stage funding!
The funds will be used to further our goal of connecting real-world bill payments to the blockchain, helping people around the world better manage their everyday finances through their crypto wallets and on-chain assets.
We started Spritz to empower crypto and DeFi users to easily pay their bills with their choice of crypto, whether “hodling” bitcoin, staking ETH, participating in yield farms or even playing games on the blockchain.
And now we’re one step closer to creating even more real-world financial utility from any digital asset.
With our pre-seed funding, we will be able to ramp up product development, increase our marketing capacity, and hire more staff globally – all leading to bigger goals of improving our platform and growing our global community of crypto and DeFi users looking for smarter ways to invest their hard-earned dollars, generate more passive income streams, and take care of their real-world expenses seamlessly.
If you’re new to Spritz or just finding us through this announcement, let us first tell you a bit about who we are and the problems we’re trying to solve!
Many of the tens of millions of crypto users today — with over $100 billion in value locked in DeFi, and billions more in NFTs and play-to-earn assets — are already living their financial lives on the blockchain: investing their paychecks through regular token and NFT buys, searching for yield, paying friends, and borrowing when they need to.
But much of these users' financial lives — paying rent or mortgages, paying their credit card and utility bills, buying things like groceries or Netflix subscriptions — remains stubbornly in the traditional banking system.
Checking accounts earn an average of 0.03% yield and require 3 days or more to make transfers, so why should these be at the center of our financial lives?. If you’ve tried to pay a bill with funds from crypto, then you know it involves closing out your crypto position, incurring fees, and then waiting to offramp your funds to a traditional bank.
Many of us dream of the day that we can drop our bank entirely and make decentralized finance the operating system of our financial lives, in which our financial activities are programmable, fast, and accessible to everyone.
At Spritz, we’re building a network of bridges between blockchain assets and real-world financial use cases. This will eventually be a decentralized protocol that anyone can integrate with.
Our team has built several “bridges” that are already launched for users in the US. Through our beautiful and fun mobile app (currently in private beta), users can link deposits on Polygon to pay credit cards like Chase Sapphire, mortgages like Wells Fargo, and even student loan payments.
Our vision is a world in which folks can instantly and securely pay for all of their everyday needs with crypto and any on-chain asset, replacing the need for a bank account at all!
The Spritz app is currently in closed beta testing, but you can join the waitlist today!! We are inviting our most dedicated users to help us test new features before our public launch coming soon.
We’ve been able to partner with some of the biggest names in the Web3 and crypto world: Sandeep Nailwal, Co-Founder of Polygon; Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of the giant crypto exchange Coinbase; and Aaron Harris, former Fintech Partner at Y Combinator.
Other notable investors include Diogo Mónica, Founder & CEO of Anchorage Digital; Shiliang Tang, CIO of Ledger Prime (now part of the FTX US family); and Sam Hodges, Founder of Lending Circle and Vouch.
Shiliang Tang and Chris Sheehan have a longstanding history of building financial solutions. Together, they founded the New York-based company WorldClover, which offered weather index insurance in Africa, and was funded by Y Combinator, Index Ventures, and others.
With the $2.5 million in funding secured, we plan to use the money to help further our goals of building bridges between the real-world and the world of digital assets.
Ultimately, we envision a multichain future where current and new layer 1 and layer 2 blockchains – yes, including Bitcoin! – are used by everyday folks around the world to pay their bills. We plan to build developer tools to empower engineers outside the US to connect TradFi services, like utility payments or mobile money, to the wide world of crypto, simply by integrating with Spritz.
We also plan to support other popular networks such as Solana and Avalanche down the road.
For now, Spritz is looking to partner with other DeFi companies and communities that align with our vision and goal of providing a better experience for our users, as well as growing our own community as a whole.
We’re eternally grateful to our investors for joining us on the journey to build a much needed solution for one of the biggest pain points in Web3. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but at the end of the day, there’s always room to build more and that’s a challenge that excites us too!
We hope you’ll join us on our journey as well.
Cheers, Team Spritz