Invoices are used to pay for many of the major costs. Most still rely on solutions built on top of bank transfers or credit cards to complete cross-border payments, which can take up to 2 days to complete and represent a $130 trillion global market.
Paysail just raised seed funding to build a tool that shortens the cross-border payment process to less than five seconds. Stable coins are designed to have a stable price because they are pegged to a commodity or currency.
Paysail states that using stable coins to pay invoices reduces transaction fees for businesses. Paysail co-founder Nicole Alonso said in an interview that other startups in the space have hit a ceiling on how fast and cheap they can offer payments because of the fees charged by the middleman.
Nicole Alonso and Liam Brennan-Burke founded Paysail. Paysail is an image.
The US and Canada have made huge strides in making payments cheaper and quicker. It could still be difficult to send a payment from the US to Africa, and it could cost a lot of money.
The cost of making a cross-border payment using legacy systems like Bill.com usually includes a transaction fee and currency exchange fee. Alonso said that a transfer done through Paysail costs less than a tenth of a cent for the transaction to be verified on the block.
Paysail is currently using Celo's CUSD stablecoin, which tracks the price of the U.S. dollar, to enable payments, and plans to expand to other stable coins backed by different countries' currencies as it grows. Alonso said that the business could be structured as a tiered offering based on each company's transaction volume and that it would ideally undercut any existing competitors in the non-crypto space on price.
Uncork Capital led the $4 million seed round for the company. Angel investors, including the founder and CEO of Ebury, also participated in the round.
Liam Brennan-Burke, co-founder of Alonso, said that Paysail's current users comprise a small cohort of companies, most of which are already transacting incryptocurrencies. Brennan-Burke said the company wants to fine-tune its solution before expanding to those with no previous experience.
Paysail is the only full-time employee that Alonso and Brennan-Burke started. They plan to use their funding to hire a full-time engineering team, as well as legal counsel and eventually a sales team.
Paysail is building its tech to allow users who don't have an existing wallet to use a third-party wallet provider to generate a noncustodial wallet on their behalf. Brennan-Burke said that it was aiming to eventually bring this in-house and add new features to the Paysail wallet. In countries like Nigeria, where local currency depreciation poses a significant risk, companies may prefer to hold their wealth in stable coins and transfer it into local currency on their own timetable.
Brennan-Burke said that the goal is to make the platform easy to use for businesses and individuals who don't have any prior experience with it.
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