London-based Web3 payments company Helio has announced a successful funding round, raising $3.3 million in a seed round. With a vision to build a “Stripe” for the Web3 economy, the fintech was founded by serial entrepreneurs Jim Walker and Stijn Paumen. Lead investors are Dutch VC Peak and Lightspeed Faction, with additional participation coming from RockawayX, Solana Labs, and leading angel investors.
In order to strike partnerships with creator platforms and marketplaces, the funding will be used to build out the sales and marketing teams. A multi-chain strategy will be pursued by Helio, with launches planned for Bitcoin and Binance, as well as an in-app wallet that will enable Web2-style payments and integrations.
“Payments is the ultimate blockchain killer app, promising lower fees, instant settlement for merchants, and increased privacy & friction-free checkouts for users. Our goal is to bring these benefits to 100s of millions of users over time by lowering the barriers of using web3 technology and offering a familiar payment UX”, said Stijn Paumen, CEO of Helio. “We’re thrilled with the backing, which will allow us to execute on our roadmap, scale the platform and streamline onboarding new clients.”
Helio has handled over $10 million in e-commerce and NFT sales, SaaS subscriptions, content paywalls and subscriptions since launching in summer 2022. “Digital payments is a +10T market with double-digit growth driven by emerging payment technologies such as blockchain payments. We believe a sizeable share of transactions will be executed on blockchains in the coming decade, creating a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity”, said David Zwagemaker, Partner at Peak. “Helio will be leading the way with their API and simple UI that makes it easy for anyone to integrate in minutes and process Web3 payments without any prior blockchain experience.”
Founders Jim & Stijn have built SaaS startups for 20 years, with two successful exits totaling $600M
The Helio solution enables merchants, dApps, and creators to accept instant crypto payments across multiple blockchains, including Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum. By offering built-in content paywalling features, the platform enables creators, such as podcasters, YouTubers, artists, NFT projects, media, and platforms, to monetize content in a new way and reach new audiences.
“We were instantly excited by Helio’s focus on digital content as an emerging use case for Web3 payments”, said Sam Harrison, Managing Partner at Lightspeed Faction. “A crypto wallet can also act as a portable digital identity, meaning creators can eliminate sign-ups from their checkout flow. At the same time, users can instantly unlock and pay for content with a micropayment and a single tap of their wallet saving 2-3 minutes it would take to sign up and pay over traditional, expensive card rails. That level of friction is completely removed with Helio”.
