Meet Nilos, a startup looking to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional commercial bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that shows all your transactions – be it fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile transactions across multiple accounts.
The startup raised $5.2 million in funding in April. Viola Ventures and Cloth Ventures led the round while Mensch Capital Partners also participated. A number of business angels contributed to this round, such as Yuval Tal, Sebastien Bourget, Emmanuel Shalit, Benjamin Seror, Didier Vallet, Guillaume Houze, Philippe Suchet and Valentine Baudon.
“We started with a simple discovery. There are thousands of companies that manage crypto assets, but there are even more companies that want to own crypto assets – but they find it too complicated,” founder and CMO Eytan Messika told me.
And it’s true that there are many implications when you start dealing with cryptocurrencies. There are some tax issues and some compliance requirements. Treating fraud can be very complicated. Large companies have enough resources and can easily add crypto assets to their cash balance – but it’s still a problem for smaller companies.
Basically, Nilos wants to lower the barrier to entry. If you’re just starting out, you can create a crypto wallet that stores directly with Nilos. This way, customers don’t have to directly store and manage digital assets.
In the future, customers will be able to connect their own wallets directly. For example, you can use Gnosis Safe, which is popular for companies that hold crypto assets. Likewise, you will soon be able to link your traditional commercial bank accounts within the interface.
After that, what you get is a nice dashboard to help sort out all your transactions. You can filter, categorize and tag both incoming and outgoing transactions. You can also reconcile payments directly from Nilos.
Image Credits: Nilos
Nilos also helps you manage your crypto transactions as you can process crypto-to-crypto payments as well as crypto-to-fiat payments. You can use that feature to pay employees and suppliers and balance your treasury between crypto and fiat assets.
The startup currently charges a fee on crypto-to-fiat transactions, but the company plans to move to a traditional software-as-a-service subscription model as it becomes more transparent to end users. Some of the early clients are OtherBlock, Rocket3, Metafight and Rarecubes.
Nilos is registered under the supervision of the Financial Crimes Investigation Service (FCIS) of Lithuania, but the company plans to pre-apply to become a virtual asset service provider in France under the PSAN scheme.
In other words, it’s still early days for Nilos. But it is clear that crypto companies mostly focus on large enterprise customers and retail investors. Small companies remain underserved markets, and Nilos plans to take advantage of this.
Image Credits: Nilos
