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Crypto payments startup Celo has announced A16Z Crypto and Polychain Capital have made an investment of $25 million in total.
Officially announced in June 2018, Celo aims to remove the barriers for large-scale adoption of cryptocurrencies as means-of-payment. Its team includes experience from the World Bank Group, United Nations, Google, Whatsapp, Microsoft, Apple, Square, Ripple, PayPal, Morgan Stanley, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Berkeley.
Last month, Celo announced two digital assets – Celo Dollar, a stable-value digital asset pegged to the US Dollar, and Celo Gold, a deflationary digital asset that absorbs the fluctuations in the stable asset’s value with the help of the Celo protocol.
The Celo protocol has been designed to be mobile-friendly and “ultralight” to ease sending payments – users can send funds to their friends’ cellphone numbers, CoinDesk explained.
In a blog post dated April 02, the company said:
“a16z crypto has purchased $15 million USD of Celo Gold and Polychain Capital has purchased $10 million USD of Celo Gold, alongside additional Celo Gold purchases from several other leading institutions spanning the Americas, EMEA, and Asia, during a recently closed round.”
Celo had previously raised $6.5 million in an initial funding round which saw participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Coinbase, Jack Dorsey, Naval Ravikant, Linda Xie, Social Capital, and Lakestar, among others.
The startup has been running a test of the easy-to-use wallet app in Argentina, where protocol verified users and merchants have been sending and receiving small payments. It has also conducted a field research in Tanzania.
Celo is planning to release its public testnet this summer, along with open-sourcing its codebase.
