• Walnut Insurance

  Participated · Seed · Dec 2022

  Toronto-based Walnut Insurance has built a cloud-native platform that embeds insurance products directly into the digital experiences of enterprise partners, financial institutions, insurers, and brokers. The system digitizes policy design and customer journeys, offers headless or co-branded API delivery, and can quote, bind, and enroll customers in real time—typically within 30-90 days instead of the years a traditional integration can take. Walnut’s model reduces insurers’ upfront marketing costs by shifting to partner-driven distribution and allows profit-sharing arrangements that improve unit economics. Partners benefit from higher average revenue per user, stronger customer relationships, and lower churn, while consumers receive timely, tailored coverage through streamlined, data-driven workflows. In today’s macroeconomic climate the company is emphasizing loan and debt-protection products such as creditor insurance to shield borrowers and lenders from income loss or default risk. The new capital will be used to expand Walnut’s engineering team, enhance its API infrastructure, and enter additional markets. No revenue, user, or profitability figures were disclosed in the article.

• Cybrid

  Participated · Seed · Apr 2022

  Cybrid offers an API-first platform that unifies stablecoin, fiat, and compliance functionality, enabling fintechs, banks, and enterprises to launch scalable, global payment solutions. The company’s infrastructure supports end-to-end cross-border payments to more than 150 countries, giving customers full transparency. By consolidating multiple payment and regulatory components, Cybrid accelerates time-to-market for firms seeking to integrate digital asset capabilities. Its target users include financial institutions in both the U.S. and Canada that need compliant stablecoin rails. The firm is led by Co-Founder & CEO Avinash Chidambaram alongside CTO Brent Carrara, President & COO Dean Brauer, and Co-Founder & VP of Sales Ali Irshad. Cybrid recently secured $10 million in Series A funding to expand its operations and broaden its business reach. The fresh capital strengthens the company’s financial position as it scales its payments infrastructure offering.

• Clickatell

  Participated · Series C · Feb 2022

  Clickatell builds a chat commerce and mobile messaging platform that lets businesses communicate and transact with customers via SMS, USSD and WhatsApp. Its core offerings include messaging APIs, payments-in-chat (it was among the first to launch payments initiated out of WhatsApp), and integrations such as Chat2Pay launched with Visa/Cybersource. The company reports double-digit profitable growth for more than a decade and says it has processed over 30 billion interactions and 2 billion commerce transactions since 2020. In Nigeria Clickatell reaches 17 million end customers and handles up to 1.3 million payment transactions daily. Clickatell intends to use new capital to expand its U.S. footprint, scale sales and marketing, and accelerate development of its chat commerce offering across South Africa and Nigeria. Founded in 2000 in South Africa and now headquartered in California, the company also maintains offices in Nigeria and Canada. Clickatell operates an SMS gateway that enables businesses to send bulk text messages for marketing, notifications, and transactional use cases. The company also provides mobile financial-transaction solutions and is developing new transaction services for developing countries. Clickatell serves roughly 13,000 enterprise, government, and SMB customers and employs about 120 people. It is profitable and generates "double-digit millions" in revenue. The company is launching a new web-based SMS messaging package for U.S. small and medium businesses and plans to expand in emerging markets. Clickatell was originally founded in South Africa in 2000 and is now based in Redwood City, California.

No current team members are available.