Cenoa raises $7m in seed funding round

By Leandra Monteiro

Cenoa, a borderless super wallet improving access to dollar-based products in emerging markets, announced it has raised $7 million in Seed funding.

The fundraise was led by San Francisco-based venture capital firm Quiet Capital, an early backer of Robinhood; and Underscore VC, a Boston-based firm focused on backing the next generation of iconic companies at their earliest stages. Further investors include Human Capital, Ulu Ventures, Acrew Capital, and Collective Spark – who have all invested in successful well-known global neo bank and FinTech unicorns such as Chime, Coinbase, Brex and SoFi.

Proceeds from the fundraise will be used to grow Cenoa’s operations to expand both beyond its core product and to new markets in Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Cenoa’s product development aims to add US Dollar-based debit cards and instant money transfers within the next 18 months. Funds will also be used to hire talent across different business functions from product development to engineering for its fully remote global team.

Seçkin Çağlın, Founder and Co-CEO of Cenoa, said, “Cenoa offers easy access to digital dollar-based products, 100 percent designed for the everyday user. We believe in using modern technologies such as blockchain to provide one-click access to the digital dollar ecosystem to benefit the customers that need that access most – those in emerging economies lacking stable currencies like Argentina and Nigeria. People in these countries should be able to easily and affordably access US Dollars and beat inflation while saving, a function the traditional financial system has failed to provide.”

Michael Bloch, Partner at Quiet Capital, said, “Cenoa is on a mission to broaden access to the US financial ecosystem, which will enable billions of people around the world to safely protect & grow their wealth. As early investors in many disruptive fintech companies, we similarly see untapped, significant potential for simple & safe solutions like Cenoa that can unlock new services to the people that need them most.”

Cenoa’s target for the next two years is to onboard millions of customers worldwide and bring seamless local currency-to-dollar conversion to users. Built on blockchain technology, its non-custodial savings solution cuts out the costs for branches, intermediary fees, and other inefficient procedures of traditional banking.