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Juno has secured $3 million seed round to develop a platform leveraging cryptocurrencies and Ethereum protocols to offer “neo banking” services such as high-yield savings and debit cards.
The startup was founded by Varus Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray, and Siddharth Verma, the same people who launched the Nuo protocol last year.
Deshpande told the Economic Times that the funding will be used to grow its teams in Bengaluru and Singapore and apply for relevant licenses in select markets. Juno aims to establish an open and global financial system for everyone, despite their location and income.
It plans to allow clients to hold the dollar-pegged USDC stablecoin and offer a 5.5% annual interest in their savings, with no lock-in or hidden fees. Clients can send or receive money worldwide at a lower cost and without intermediaries. It will feature a Venmo-style peer-to-peer payment option.
“If there’s anything that can take DeFi on crypto mainstream, it would be an interest rate,” Deshpande said.
Contrary to other lending products built on Ethereum, Juno clients will not be directly affected by the volatility of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Instead, the platform simplifies its interface by “removing the complexities of web 3.0 and volatility of crypto assets.”
The round was led by investors such as Polychain Capital and Sequoia Capital. Dragonfly Capital, ConsenSys Labs, Astarc Ventures, Singapore Angel Network and several angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’ ex-chief technology officer and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Meanwhile, Polychain Capital also led the funding of encryption startup NuCypher, a decentralized blockchain privacy layer that works as a key management system.
