Spritz Finance Raises $2.5 Million in Pre-Seed Funding

May 24, 2022 – Greenwich, Connecticut

Spritz Finance, which offers decentralized financial services (DeFi), allowing users to easily pay their bills with crypto, recently closed a pre-seed round of $2.5 million. The funds will be used for hiring, expanding the platform’s crypto payments integrations, and making the product compatible across multiple blockchains.

Some of the notable investors include Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Aaron Harris, former fintech partner at Y Combinator. The funding round also includes participation from Ledger Prime, OrangeDAO, Shima Ventures, DCG Genesis, Awesome People Ventures and others.

Spritz is founded by Christopher Sheehan, an MIT computer scientist and former Y Combinator investee.

Sheehan said,

“We believe there is a strong need to better connect real-world bill payments with crypto wallets that are easy to set up and simple to manage. Our mission is to automate financial freedom for millions of people by enabling them to better utilize their on-chain income streams – whether from putting capital to work or by staking, earning in games and yield farms – to directly pay their expenses each month, without needing a bank.”

Spritz is building the exact type of product that he envisions on the Polygon network, according to Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, who said,

“I’m so excited to be backing Spritz and be a part of bringing personal finance into the Web 3.0 era. Mass adoption of crypto is our core mission at Polygon, so by enabling anyone who’s generating income streams through DeFi, P2E games, NFTs and the metaverse, Spritz is a perfect fit for our ecosystem. I’m looking forward to helping Chris and his team build the future of finance.”

According to Srinivasan, the crypto market has a strong need for companies providing more crypto off-ramps integrated with today’s leading stablecoin yield protocols and DeFi apps, such as Aave and Sushiswap. This makes it seamless for people to program their interest-bearing crypto accounts toward paying real-world bills like their rent, credit cards or student loan.

Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, said,

“People will probably pay more bills using crypto in the future. Spritz is working on making that mainstream sooner than later.”

Spritz will also be using the funds to further build bridges and connections from the real world to the digital world. The company envisions a multichain future, where current and new layer one and layer two blockchains, including Bitcoin, are used by people around the world every day to pay their bills.

Spritz plans 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.

Spritz, which is currently hiring for many key roles, is testing its bill pay product in a closed beta. However, users interested in testing it out can join the waitlist for the beta by visiting Spritz’s website. The company is building its initial DeFi to TradFi off-ramp on the Polygon network, which has over $3.5 billion in total volume and enables faster and cheaper transactions, with plans to support other popular networks for DeFi, including Solana and Terra in the future.

About Spritz Finance

Spritz Finance enables bill pay directly from DeFi protocols, with no bank required, on a path to eventually connecting every smart contract and every traditional use of funds in the entire world – from mortgage payments and credit cards to monthly utility bills.

Through the company’s first product, customers can schedule their bill payments from their crypto wallets and favorite DeFi protocols without ever needing to unwind their positions or off-ramp through a bank. The company is currently in closed beta with a waitlist, which can be joined from the Spritz website.

Contact

David Gardner, head of marketing and growth at Spritz Finance