Crypto payments: Rise raises $3.8 million

Are we heading for a crypto springtime?

While it's impossible to predict, the recent number of fundraisings can at least give cause for some optimism. After Bitstack, Swaap Finance and Deblock all pulled together last week, Rise - another French (and also American) start-up - has, in turn, just completed a fine deal.

The start-up, which has not even blown out its first candle, has raised $3.8 million in a seed round. Several web3 investment funds have invested in the company: These include Sino Global Capital, Polymorphic Capital as well as Paradigm Shift or the Draper Association.

Created by Frenchman Hugo Finkelstein and American Andrew Maurer, Rise offers a solution for managing payments and invoices in crypto and fiat currencies (euro, dollar, etc.). "We are already working with several dozen companies," explains Hugo Finklestein. "They want to be able to pay their employees or service providers in crypto without having to manage all the operations themselves with transfers and compliance," he adds.

The vast majority of Rise's customers are mainly crypto companies. The start-up counts Lido Finance, ZenLabs, Flux, or T3rn among its customers.

Rise's platform has been developed on Arbitrum, a secondary layer of Ethereum that enables a huge number of transactions to be carried out for modest costs. "Our entire infrastructure is on Arbitrum, even though we have the capacity to receive and send funds on other channels", Hugo Finkelstein continues. These include Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon and Avalanche.

The aim of the start-up, which is able to operate in 90 currencies (euro, dollar...) and more than 100 different cryptocurrencies is obviously to broaden its customer base outside the crypto world. Its fundraising round should enable it to move in that direction.

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