Pillow wants to be an all-in-one platform that can help beginners save, spend and invest incryptocurrencies. The Singapore-based startup has raised $18 million in a Series A financing.
Over 75% of the app's users are in over sixty countries. It supports 10 digital assets and plans to expand to over 50 assets in the next few months.
Pillow was founded in 2021 by Arindam Roy, RajathKM and Kartik Mishra. Since the beginning of the year, it has grown its user base by 300% and assets under management by 5 times. It has recently expanded into other countries.
Roy and KM were both employed in the traditional finance industry before founding Pillow. The two started a Discord server on the side to onboard people onto web3 which eventually grew to more than 15000 people.
There was a pattern of problems repeating according to the two. People don't know how to pay gas fees, they don't know what transaction to approve, and they end up losing money.
Around this time, the two met Mishra, who was head of business for Indian delivery startup Dunzo, and started talking about how to solve the onboarding problem at scale.
We realized that the challenge is that the mental model of how retail users perceive transactions is different than the one used for cryptocurrencies. They said that you would need a strong technical background to be able to transact in digital currency.
Pillow was born to make it easier to understand the use ofCryptocurrencies.
The Pillow team has to deal with some big issues. Awareness is the first thing that comes to mind, since the majority of people don't understand other use cases. The second is complexity since using the whole thing in its entirety means understanding gas fees. They said that a person who just wants to transact won't scale the learning curve.
Pillow uses single-click daily interest savings to solve these problems. It intends to do the same for other services.
In order to use Pillow for the first time, people need to provide KYC information, such as live selfies and national identity cards. Afterwards, they learn about the risks of investing in digital assets before they make a decision. They learn about the asset's potential risks before investing.
They can make a transfer from their own wallet to the displayed wallet address on Pillow if they want. Users in countries where Pillow has partnerships with local, compliant on-ramp service providers are able to use their local currency to buyCryptocurrencies. Pillow supports deposits and withdrawals in Nigeria, the Philippines and Vietnam, with plans to add more across Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Nigeria is the startup's largest user base, and it also has major presences in India, Vietnam, and Brazil. It allows retail investors to invest as little as $5.
The closest competitors to Pillow are from all over the world. They include a multi- asset exchange in Southeast Asia and a global savings app. The goal of Pillow is to be a home for digital asset-driven financial services that allow first time users to earn, save, spend and invest from the same platform.
Transaction fees will be introduced as new products, including swaps and tokenized real world assets are introduced. It makes profits on returns that are higher than the returns that are accessible to users. Pillow keeps a small percentage of the spread and part of it goes into its yield reserves.
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