Ansa emerges from stealth, secures $5.4m funding

By Delisha Fernandes

Ansa, has announced the launch of its  digital wallet infrastructure platform for merchants alongside its first round of funding of $5.4 million.

The round was led by Christina Melas-Kyriazi at Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Nimi Katragadda at Box Group, Nichole Wischoff at Wischoff Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, The FinTech Fund, and Susa Ventures. Female investors and angels contributed over 75% of the funding round.

Ansa co-founders Sophia Goldberg and JT Cho witnessed the challenges faced by merchants first-hand while working for Adyen and Affirm, respectively. The company is built around the co-founders’ shared ethos that payments should be a tool, not a hurdle. Sophia Goldberg, Co-founder Ansa, said, “Your loyal customers shouldn’t cost you the most. We want to help merchants strengthen their relationship with their most loyal customers while optimising unit economics.”

Goldberg added, “Over the last few years, digital wallets have become an increasingly popular payment method. We’ve seen this adoption in other countries, such as China, through Alipay and WeChat Pay, and we expect this trend to continue globally. Starbucks has been a leader in closed-loop mobile payments in the US with its wallet. Overall, payments in the US lag behind the world. We’re on a mission to help merchants embed payments in a way that fits their use cases best.”

Christina Melas-Kyriazi, the partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “We believe Ansa can do to closed-loop wallets what Marqeta has done for card-issuing, accelerating adoption by lowering the bar and cost to implement. Today it’s too costly and burdensome for most merchants to offer payment systems that give them control and flexibility while lowering costs, and Ansa wants to change that.”

Ansa, is a FinTech solution to help enterprises build embedded wallets to decrease payment costs, increase revenue, and drive customer loyalty. Ansa’s digital wallet solution is customizable for any business and reduces the card transaction fees that especially cripple small payments.