As Ty Schenk was working for a lot of international companies, he was being paid through various channels, like PayPal, SWIFT and cryptocurrency.
He said he saw the "huge costs and delays businesses and people were facing with cross-border payments, and felt they needed to be improved."
Ultimately, he founded Keeta with the goal of streamlining cross-border payments and offering lower costs and faster transactions. The specific goal is to enable these payments to occur in seconds and be 50% to 70% cheaper, with the "guaranteed" best exchange rate, Schenk said.
"Trillions of dollars per day get transferred across borders, but cross-border payments are currently slow, expensive and complicated," he said. "Businesses who have international customers have to deal with slow payments, high fees, complicated routing and unfair exchange rates. Businesses and families experience huge costs and delays every day. If we do this at scale, we can save the globe billions of dollars in fees."
The cross-border payments industry is "massive," Schenk said — for example, SWIFT is used about 45 million times per day.
Based in Santa Monica, California, with a secondary office in New York City, Keeta did a soft launch in early June, with $17 million in seed funding from investors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
"Keeta's technology is orders of magnitude more scalable and efficient than existing solutions," Schmidt told L.A. Inno. "I'm thrilled to support Ty and his team in their mission to modernize global payments."
The company, which has 26 employees, seven of whom are international, plans to spend its recent funding to expand its sales and marketing capabilities as it focuses on its go-to-market strategy.
Before the recent seed round, Keeta raised $2 million in a pre-seed round. Its current valuation is $75 million.
Improving international payments
There hasn't been a lot of innovation in global payments, Schenk said, and when there has been, the focus has mainly been on the domestic side. Plus, international finance is "really complicated," he said, with different laws, regulators, payment protocols, banks and languages in almost every country.
"It's a complex ecosystem to sort out and takes a lot of specialized expertise," he told L.A. Inno.
Meanwhile, the economic situation around the world continues to be volatile, with customers fleeing from large banks including Silicon Valley Bank.
Keeta works with conservative, stress-tested banks and is able to offer $50 million in FDIC insurance to customers.
"Given the current environment, our customers expect us to be more buttoned-up than ever as a result of these crises," Schenk said.
Before starting Keeta, Schenk co-founded BrainBlocks, and grew it from a small weekend project to a team of engineers. The company secured hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto wallet storage and enabled real-time merchant transactions with a payment processing engine built from the ground up.
With Keeta, Schenk wanted to delve deeper into the intricacies of payment systems. He identified the "pressing" need for improvement. Making payment processing seamless, secure and efficient was critical, he said.
He started Keeta in 2022, striving to make international payments "as easy as Venmo" for businesses and consumers alike. The company has been in stealth mode for the last year and a half.
It's launching in multiple regions including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the U.K. and the European Union.
How Keeta Works
Keeta aims to simplify the routing process of payments by forming direct partnerships with organizations in close to 50 countries.
"We also built incredible ledger technology that instantly validates transactions, balances and identities to create an immutable audit trail," he said.
Companies operating in a similar space domestically include Venmo, Stripe, Wise and SWIFT. Keeta looked to platforms like those and adopted their strengths and capabilities for consumers and B2B. It then created a system that can send and receive cross-border payments in real time.
The company is starting with three verticals: Keeta Network, Keeta Platform and an app known as Keeta Pay.
The network is the underling ledger system that houses all of the banking nodes and licenses around the world. The platform enables businesses and financial institutions to plug into the network. The consumer app essentially functions as an international Venmo.
"At the core, the difference is that we’re solving a cyber-supply chain problem, not a technology problem," Schenk said. "Our technology essentially acts as the bridge connecting all of the individual regions, so a payment can easily go from sender to recipient without a slew of intermediaries in the middle."
Keeta makes money through small transaction fees.
"Unlike a lot of competitors that operate at volume pricing, we want to offer the best rates and the most efficient way of delivering payments," Schenk said. "Larger players out there have a 10x markup or charge more for smaller transactions. Whether you’re sending $100 or $100,000, we treat all of our users the same."
In terms of target demographics, Keeta is for those who want to send money across borders; neobanks, since their customers often operate around the world; and tech companies with global teams and customers. Down the road, Keeta hopes to partner with Main Street banks.
To start, access being given to businesses and consumers via invitation.
