The South Africans behind a R14 billion fintech startup

BVNK, founded by a group of South Africans, has developed a platform to fuel the next era of stablecoin payments.

The company has raised $50 million (R940 million) to support its growth, at a valuation of around $750 million (R14 billion).

BVNK was founded in 2021 by three South Africans – Jesse Hemson-Struthers, Donald Jackson, and Chris Harmse.

The platform offers banking services and payments for crypto-native businesses. Companies using BVNK can accept payments in fiat and cryptocurrencies.

Through BVNK, companies can hold hundreds of different currencies and crypto assets and send funds worldwide.

In 2022, the cryptocurrency startup closed a $40 million Series A funding round at a $340 million post-money valuation.

Tiger Global, the venture capital firm behind Takealot and which invested in Bidorbuy and Private Property, left the funding round.

Other investors included The Raba Partnership, Avenir, Kingsway Capital, Nordstar, Concentric, and Base Capital.

The most recent funding round doubled the company’s value and introduced further investors in the crypto startup.

These investors include Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, DRW VC, and existing investors Avenir and Tiger Global Management.

Hemson-Struthers, BVNK’s chief executive, said the company’s ambition has always been to accelerate global money movement with stablecoins.

“We’ve been building infrastructure that makes it easy for businesses to send, receive, exchange, and store stablecoins and fiat funds.

Their infrastructure is technology agnostics and enables the movement of funds across fiat payment rails and blockchains.

He explained that stablecoins represent a path to efficiency, product innovation and new revenue for payment companies.

However, companies face a challenge as payments at scale don’t come naturally with blockchain.

“Over the last 5 years, we’ve built our own stablecoin infrastructure at BVNK to solve the problems we faced as we scaled to over $8bn in annualised volumes,” he said.

The BVNK infrastructure includes:

• A flexible accounting model that enables reconciliation, maximizes liquidity and avoids needless gas fees.
• Automated consolidation and management of gas and fees and liquidity pooling across all blockchain networks.
• Smart on-chain transaction monitoring to optimise working capital.

“These kinds of payment optimisations save a lot of time and hassle. They’re now part of Layer1, our self-custody stablecoin infrastructure,” he said.

“We’ve grown our payments volume 200% year-on-year, processing $10 billion in annualised volumes for businesses.”

He said the latest funding round allows them to build on this success and bring BVNK’s stablecoin payment services to the largest global markets.

Here are the South Africans who are behind BVNK, which is headquartered in London.

Jesse Hemson-Struthers – co-founder and chief executive officer

Jesse Hemson-Struthers is a serial entrepreneur. His previous ventures in e-commerce and gaming were successfully acquired by global media giants Naspers and Sportradar.

Donald Jackson – co-founder and chief technology officer

Donald Jackson has extensive experience in enterprise-grade systems and blockchain technology. He previously founded Cue, a bootstrapped customer engagement platform, and Verity, a fraud reduction service.

Chris Harmse – co-founder and chief business officer

Chris Harmse is a chartered financial analyst, experienced FX trader, and was previously a partner at a macro/crypto fund before co-founding BVNK.

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