Sequoia Spark’s startup Nume has raised $2 million ( around Rs 15.6 crore) from Sequoia Capital India, Beenext, Whiteboard Capital, and several prominent angels.
Launched last year for female founders, Spark is a year-long fellowship program combining equity-free capital of $100,000 and mentorship for women-led companies in India and Southeast Asia.
Founded last year by sisters Madhumitha and Niveda Harishankar, Nume is a layer two protocol that facilitates crypto payments between merchants and buyers for near zero gas fees. The company intends to use the funds to take the product to the market in the next 2-3 months. In its first phase, Nume will support five cryptos including Ethereum.
“What we’re building is a way for merchants to really cheaply accept cryptocurrency payments and for customers to be able to shop on the web. We’re focused on even more stable coins and popular cryptocurrencies because merchants have a huge concern regarding volatility and that’s something that we wanted to start addressing from the very first day,” said Harishankar.
Blockchains have a very low throughput – Ethereum’s 30 transactions per second compared to Visa’s capacity of 65,000 transactions per second – leading to congestion and prohibitively high gas prices (a cost associated with verifying transactions on the blockchain). Nume plans to charge a fixed commission of 1% and not pass on the gas fees to the customers.
“Our protocol can shield any notion of gas costs. So when we say 1%, we can keep it at 1%. And that’s because, at scale, our cost actually doesn’t increase linearly with the number of transactions we do,” she said.
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It will launch two products this year, NumePay, a non-custodial wallet that allows retail consumers to deposit their crypto and start shopping with businesses that have integrated with NumePay checkout — with no gas fees; and NumePay Business which enables businesses to start offering cryptocurrency payment options to their customers at 1% per transaction.
The founders have several years of academic and corporate experience in engineering and building products.
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