Investing in Valora

"We’re at an exciting moment in the history of crypto because as the industry matures and adoption accelerates, entrepreneurs from all backgrounds are flooding into the space, bringing new perspectives, skill sets, and experiences to the ecosystem. Jackie Bona, CEO of Valora, is one such leader. We got to know Jackie through her work at another a16z crypto portfolio company, Celo Labs, where she was Head of Consumer Growth and on the founding team that developed Valora, a mobile-first crypto wallet, enabling borderless payments in seconds with near-zero fees," noted Katie Haun and Arianna Simpson. 

Read the full investment memo here.

• Grameen Foundation used Valora to safely and efficiently deliver aid to 3,500 entrepreneurs in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic
• A16z Leads $20M Bet That Celo’s Valora Becomes a ‘Global Gateway to Crypto’
• Celo-Powered Valora Closes Series A Funding, Becomes a Standalone Company as Crypto Mobile App Gains Traction

"The WhatsApp of Crypto"

Known as the crypto wallet “for the people”, Valora on Celo blockchain is designed to work in a more consumer-friendly, low-fee, and mobile-native fashion with phone numbers replacing the typical private keys associated with wallets. Most users in Celo’s network care about the abilities to send, receive, and access money from their phones, off-ramp easily, do things that have the potential to earn money, and pay low fees. This is why Valora is absolutely critical to the ecosystem.

The Company aims to make the first truly global financial super app facilitating payments seamlessly via a stablecoin-based method (cUSD, cEUR, cREAL) that is tied to people's phone numbers. Valora not only makes sending payments essentially free - averaging $0.01 per transaction, as simple and as fast as a text- but also provides many functionalities such as buying, selling, earning, collecting NFTs while allowing users to explore many other dApps within the Celo ecosystem.

10X AUM since 2021

Valora currently has $10.9M AUM, which is 10 times higher since the Series A in 2021. The app attracted 282K+ activated users, 17X since March 2021. On average, each user generates 4X number of transactions per month. This adoption resembles that of Phantom at their Series A - when the wallet had only 40K users. Phantom onboarded 2M+ users (around 100k per week) over the next 6 months as Solana became a protocol with Phantom achieving a $1.2B valuation at the next financing.

The Supercharge Rewards Program has tremendously attracted new users and drove up average stablecoin balances in all target markets. Since Sep 2021, the mobile wallet and payment app has locked in $6.5M total value of stablecoins held on platform (4X since July 2021). Notably the Euro-backed stablecoin, cEUR, has seen its balance increased at 700% in the last 8 months. 

Tapping a trillion dollar market

Mobile wallets and payments are some of the largest markets in the world. Global payments revenues are in the trillions with deposits at banks sitting in the tens of trillions, expected to grow at 22.4% CAGR between 2022 to 2027. 

Billions of people lack access to global finance

One of the earliest use-cases so many of us got excited about in crypto is borderless payments and financial services for underserved communities in regions around the world. Existing options — for everything from P2P and merchant payments, to earning and saving, to trading and investing — can be expensive, slow, and limited by region. This reality has locked billions of people out of economic opportunities. At the same time, the rise of stablecoin markets and a growing number of fiat on/off ramps around the world has created the right environment to offer a great digital wallet in these regions not previously possible in crypto.

 The blockchain for regenerative finance

Celo offers incredibly strong use cases and is adopted in more than 100 countries all over the world. The blockchain for regenerative finance is committed to carbon neutral, near zero fees, and mobile first with a robust ecosystems of decentralized apps. Large VCs are investing heavily in the Celo ecosystem, notably a16z which just led the $70M Series A into Flowcarbon, a company which aims to remove carbon from the atmosphere by creating a protocol that tokenizes carbon credits on top of Celo.

Huge companies like Kickstarter and Deutsche Telekom have chosen to make Celo their web3 home because of its mission in: 

• Proof of Stake and truly decentralized blockchain by Celo holders
• Carbon neutral in both practice and ethos
• Low transaction fees at $0.01 per txn
• Short block times at 5s per block on average
• High throughput at 102M transactions 
• At 140k TPS, Celo is the fastest EVM-compatible blockchain
• 4,000+ developers across 158 countries who are building 300+ dApps on Celo.

In Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Philippines and many emerging markets, alongside partners like the World Food Programme and Impact Market, Celo developed its early major use cases including Universal Basic Income, Decentralized Finance and Micro Payments/Paychecks.

If you’d like to learn more about the Celo blockchain, Packy McCormick wrote a post on them in April here. It is a long read, but an absolute must read to get better context on why Celo could be the next blockchain to explode in adoption, which may be critical to Valora’s success as the adoption of Ethereum was to Metamask and Solana was to Phantom.

Meet the founders

"Jackie’s experience at consumer internet companies like Spotify, Twitter, and Google has clearly been an asset to the development of a product experience that is meeting the moment, rapidly introducing people around the world to the benefits of crypto in a simple and approachable way. She’s joined by an impressive team that comes with a unique blend of expertise spanning blockchain, consumer tech, financial services, and extensive experience bringing products to market internationally." - Katie Haun and Arianna Simpson

• Jackie Bona, CEO of Valora: previously Head of Consumer Growth at the Celo Labs. Jackie’s experience at consumer internet companies like Spotify, Twitter, and Google has been an asset to the development of a product experience that is meeting the moment, rapidly introducing people around the world to the benefits of crypto in a simple and approachable way.
• Marek Olszewski, President of Valora: CTO at Celo Labs and prior VP of Engineering at GoDaddy with a PhD from MIT in Computer Science.
• Silas Boyd-Wickizer, CTO at Valora: previously Sr. Director of Engineering at GoDaddy with a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and Masters and BA in Computer Science from Stanford
• Denisse Halm, Head of Strategy & Ops: previously Partner at Celo Labs, Head of Spanish Markets at Udemy, Consultant for Abra and Expansion Strategist at Tala

In addition to the carried interest Republic Deal Room Advisor LLC is entitled to for the syndicated investments it organizes, certain principals of Republic Deal Room Advisor LLC may have a personal interests in these investments, as disclosed below. When making an investment decision please review any applicable disclosures as they represent pre-existing financial interests held by those principals of Republic Deal Room Advisor LLC.

We do not represent that the information contained herein is accurate or complete, and it should not be relied upon as such. Opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Certain information contained herein (including any forward-looking statements and economic and market information) has been obtained from and/or prepared by the Company or other third-party sources and in certain cases has not been updated through the date hereof. While such sources are believed to be reliable, Republic Deal Room Advisor LLC does not assume any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information. Republic Deal Room Advisor LLC does not undertake any obligation to update the information contained herein as of any future date.