DeFi Platform Celo Raises $20M in New Funding Round, Launches Payment App Valora

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) payments platform Celo has announced a successful $20 million fundraiser, bringing the total funds raised by the startup to $65 million. According to the official announcement, the latest funding round was backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Greenfield One, and Electric Capital. These latest investors join Celo’s earlier investors such as Coinbase Ventures and Jack Dorsey who saw the potentials in the projects earlier. Celo has also revealed the launch of its Valora app.

The source for capital is usually the inflection point for most emerging platforms, particularly in the crypto space and this holds true for Celo. According to the company, the new funds will be channeled to “support even more developers like cLabs in bringing mobile-first applications like Valora to market and accelerate integration efforts with major financial institutions that are beginning to embrace blockchain technologies to power better financial services solutions for their customers.”

Celo was launched in 2017, and since then, the platform has gradually done all it can to help drive the mainstream adoption of digital currency innovations. The network has a dedicated native currency called the CELO, as well as a stablecoin dubbed the Celo Dollar (cUSD). Asset utility has been the watchword for the startup and this can be seen in the diverse use cases of its products.

Celo Platform Launches Valora Payment App

One of the hallmarks of the achievement of the cLabs, the development arm of Celo, is the launch of the Valora app, the first mobile peer-to-peer payments and remittance app built on the Celo platform.

The Beta version of the Valora app was released back in the fall of last year and has since been adopted by over 25,000 users in about 100 countries, with hundreds of thousands of cUSD transactions across the platform. Valora was built with the mindset that cash should be available to anyone, anywhere against the existing bottlenecks prevalent in today’s financial world.

The use of the Valora payment platform offers a ton of benefits to users including low transaction fees, flexibility in payment, and incentives. Per the report, Katie Haun, general partner at a16z, said the venture firm started backing Celo two years ago because it saw “the opportunity to build a ‘full stack’ global payments platform that anyone with a smartphone could use to send, receive, and store money.”

Sebastian Blum, managing partner at Greenfield One also noted that the reason why we all got into crypto is to see the wide array of assets be used like other currencies, a mission Celo is advancing. In order to get started with Valora, users can download the app, fund it with Celo Dollars and select any recipient on their contact list to send money to, and the recipient will receive a notification to go redeem the transferred cUSD.