SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 20, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Financial Venture Studio, the country’s premier seed-stage fintech venture capital firm, today announced the six companies that will be making up their Fall 2022 cohort. This comes alongside the news that Financial Venture Studio is officially being renamed to Restive Ventures.
Restive represents the attitude of the founders that we seek to back: entrepreneurs who will not be still, who relentlessly agitate, iterate, and build. Restive is committed to financially and operationally supporting these founders and visionaries who want to get something done, and won’t rest until they do. Our newly announced Fall 2022 cohort exemplifies this commitment.
After meeting with hundreds of startups and founders in 2022, Restive has invested in six companies and will provide them with a unique engagement model that has been a foundational pillar of the fund for the past four years. This proven model includes deep operational engagement from the fund’s partners and a bespoke networking program designed to help early-stage fintech companies navigate critical elements of the financial services industry and quickly scale.
“Year after year we see even more incredible innovation and market-changing ideas coming out of the financial sector,” said Ryan Falvey, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Restive. “Our goal is to help the best founders move even more quickly by empowering them with our operational expertise, an expansive network, and capital to scale.”
Having had the privilege of investing in some of the best-performing early-stage companies in fintech, the venture capital firm sought out a name to reflect the one quality seen in their most successful founders: they’re Restive.
The Restive Fall 2022 class includes the following companies in addition to one in stealth:
Crossmint is a software platform dedicated to making NFTs accessible to the 99.99% of the population who never had one. Their first product is Crossmint Pay, an SDK for NFT sellers, marketplaces and launchpads to sell NFTs to users only with an email and credit card. It is led by co-founders Rodri Fernández Touza who has deep experience in FinTech and product and Alfonso Gómez-Jordana who did product work at WhatsApp and Google.
BlueQubit is building first-in-class quantum software for current and upcoming quantum computers in the financial industry. Led by co-founders, Hayk Tepanyan, formerly at Google and CrowdAmp, and Dr. Hrant Gharibyan, who was previously at Google and has an extensive background in quantum theory and computing.
Eisen is building a comprehensive platform for cryptocurrency transfers. With its solution, users will be able to easily and quickly transfer funds from traditional financial institutions to a user’s crypto wallet and use any combination of currencies. Founded by Allen Osgood and Stephanie Mertz; Allan previously ran payments and custody at Coinbase and Stephanie was a senior engineer at Two Sigma, the hedge fund.
Decaf is building a payment solution built on stablecoins (USDC) with a dedicated mobile wallet. With Decaf, users can send stablecoins to anyone. The company is focused on enabling cross-border commerce and physical commerce in markets with significant stablecoin adoption (mostly in LATAM). The founder had a previous social enterprise and met the rest of the team working on crypto hackathons, which culminated in them moving into a HackerHouse in Miami to launch Decaf.
Mercantile partners with business software systems of record to provide their clients with a branded business credit card. We customize the credit card programs to the vertical and the partner we work with through a tailored SMB platform, specific vendor rebates, industry-relevant rewards, and much more. Mercantile started by creating optometry clinic business credit cards, partnering with the American Optometric Association as well as DrChrono (EHR software). Co-founders, Luke Finney and Samuel F. Poirier are both former founders in the fintech space and co-founder and CTO, François-Xavier Lemire, who is a career software developer and leader.
This marks Restive’s sixth class of startups since its launch in 2018. Over the past 4 years, they have invested $25M into industry-changing companies. To hear more from Restive, check out Managing Partner & Co-Founder Ryan Falvey at Money20/20 In Las Vegas on October 23 - 26, where he will discuss the critical factors between founder and investor communication, how to maintain it through hard times, and how to build the relationship for the long term.
About Restive
Restive is on a mission to help entrepreneurs build the world’s best fintech companies. Restive Ventures partners with early founders who have an unrelenting vision to improve fintech and build world-changing companies. The team provides a foundation of early-stage capital, deep operational expertise, and systematic connections to help founders launch and grow more quickly. Learn more at https://www.restive.com or follow Twitter and LinkedIn.
Contact:
Kathy Osborne
P: 607-434-2054
press@restive.com
