When Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj worked at Citadel, they spent their nights and weekends on hacking projects. Krotinsky says that they built a version of Reddit where the user who made it to the front page would be paid $50. That’s when the two learned that sending money to people around the world was surprisingly difficult. This led them to co-found Fin, a stablecoin-powered app where people can instantly send money across borders—including large sums.
On Wednesday, Fin, formerly known as TipLink, announced it raised $17 million in funding led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Samsung Next. Krotinsky, the CEO, did not disclose his company’s valuation.
“Fin is built as the payments app of the future,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “We’re building an app that takes advantage of all the benefits of stablecoins without all the complexity, and it’s going to work anywhere in the world.”
The startup shared a walkthrough of the app in its interview with Fortune. The app is built on user-friendliness, with a simple yet elegant design. Customers have three main options: they can send and receive money to and from another Fin user, someone’s bank account, or someone’s crypto wallet. Krotinsky says that by using stablecoin rails, the financial transfer fees will be far cheaper than sending money via a bank.
