Blockchain Payments Platform Ansible Labs Raises $7M in Seed Funding Round

Ansible Labs, a startup that is building a payments platform for blockchain accounts, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round that was led by early-stage crypto venture capital firm Archetype.

The capital will go toward hiring, liquidity and operating expenses ahead of the launch of the project's first product, according to a fundraising deck provided to CoinDesk.

“We see off-ramp as a missing piece in the puzzle that is mainstream Web3 adoption and usage,” Ansible Labs co-founder and CEO Daniel Mottice told CoinDesk in an email.

The Ansible team has ties to global payments provider Visa, Mottice was product lead for Visa Crypto and helped build and launch Visa Direct Payouts, a service that allows financial institutions to push out payments to accounts around the world. Ansible co-founder and Chief Product Officer Matt Vanhouten also worked at Visa Direct and has a background in traditional finance with stints at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan & Chase.

"We're ecstatic to support Dan and the Ansible team in building a pillar company at the intersection of fintech and crypto," Ash Egan, a general partner at Archetype, said. "Ansible is solving a critical need only growing in importance as more businesses come on-chain and the creator economy in Web3 hits its stride."

Other participants in the funding round included Castle Island Ventures, A* Partners, Arca, Soma Capital, Plural VC and Eniac Ventures.

The Web3 on-boarding process, also called an "on-ramp," requires a user to set up a cryptocurrency wallet and send fiat currency to that wallet in order to purchase the crypto needed to interact with non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms and other blockchain-based programs.

Withdrawing the crypto back into fiat is called an off-ramp. While both on-ramp and off-ramp processes come with technical and regulatory complexities, Ansible Labs sees off-ramps as an underserved market.

”We see off-ramp as a key primitive that will enable Web3 businesses, creators, artists, DAO contributors and developers to more seamlessly explore and use Web3 without the headache of figuring out how to cash out their on-chain value to fiat when they need to speed value in the real world,” Mottice said.

The first product from Ansible Labs is Beam, an off-ramp product with multi-chain support for non-custodial wallets that can be used directly through a Web3 app with bank-grade compliance. Beam will be released this fall, and Ansible then plans to expand the capabilities of the product so that Web3 companies can directly integrate the customizable off-ramp prodcut into their products

Read more: Custodial Wallets vs. Non-Custodial Crypto Wallets

“The theme of programmable money need not only apply to crypto, and with seamless value transfer, fluidity and configurability between fiat and crypto, we believe that crypto payments can realize their full potential,” Mottice said.