By Kirill Gertman, co-founder & CEO, Conduit 

Today we’re excited to share that Conduit has raised $17M USD in funding, led by Portage Ventures, with support from Diagram Ventures, FinVC, Gemini Frontier Fund, Gradient Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, Inovia Capital, Gaingels, Discovery Ventures and Jump Crypto. We’re also proud to have support from executives shaping fintech,  including Mark Britto (Paypal) and Gary Marino (ex-PayPal), Asiff Hirji (ex-Coinbase), Simon Taylor (11:FS), and Nik Milanović (Google Pay), as well as a personal investment from Rex Salisbury (ex-a16z). 

At Conduit, we’re solving the problem of unequal access to financial services. The average person doesn’t have a way to earn on their savings, especially with interest rates being low and inflation on the rise. Decentralized finance (DeFi) can be an earning opportunity, but is extremely difficult to understand and access for the mainstream consumer. 

Conduit is changing this, by making it possible for companies to seamlessly integrate DeFi products within their platform by simplifying compliance, development and supporting a customer-friendly experience.

We connect fintechs, neobanks, exchanges, and traditional financial institutions to crypto-backed earning products, so that their customers can easily take advantage of the benefits of DeFi - right inside the products they already use. We do this with access through a single API to Conduit’s two main services:

  • Growth Earnings Accounts: companies can offer customers a simple way to invest in Conduit’s high-yield, decentralized finance accounts with the click or tap of a button. 
  • Corporate Treasury: companies can easily add crypto to their treasury through secure, high yield, crypto-backed holdings. 

“There has been unprecedented interest in DeFi this past year, but still huge hurdles for the average consumer to access this new economy. We’re excited to back Conduit, as we believe bridging the DeFi and Fintech worlds is a massive opportunity. The Conduit API will allow a whole new set of consumers to participate directly from platforms they already use. We’re already seen significant interest from both Fintechs and corporates in Conduit’s solution.”  - Stephanie Choo, Partner Portage Ventures.

The long term potential for DeFi and all of its use cases is still in its infancy, so we have a long journey ahead. While we started in Canada, with our funding we’re building products and go-to-market teams in Latin America and soon the U.S., two key markets driving the DeFi revolution. The new funding will also allow us to work towards general availability, so that any business can reap the benefits of what we’re building. 

If you’re inspired by our mission and interested in joining the team, we’re hiring around the globe and plan to triple our headcount during the next year! If you’d like to get in touch about our product or are a member of the press, reach out at hello@conduit.financial.