Azteco, the first company offering vouchers for small amounts of Bitcoin for everyday use, has announced today that it has acquired $6 million in seed funding. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Block, spearheaded the funding round. The money will go towards new product creation and expanding into the European and Latin American markets.
How Azteco plans to bank a multitude of the unbanked
Bitcoin is a low-cost, safe, and versatile alternative to conventional banking for many of the world’s unbanked population. In addition, it eliminates payer fraud and gives the unbanked a way to save money, buy things, and get loans without having a bank account.
Azteco is a voucher service that uses a worldwide network based on trust and local relationships to let users store, spend, and send tiny amounts of Bitcoin. The vouchers function similarly to top-up vouchers for adding talk time on Pay-as-you-go mobile phones and can be redeemed immediately for cash.
Customers in cash-centric communities can gain access to the asset by purchasing vouchers, and the company receives a fee for each transaction. Furthermore, many people do not know how to navigate the complexities of crypto exchanges and Web3 wallets. Vouchers are far more accessible, familiar, and straightforward for them.
“This investment is a catalyst to help us achieve our mission of bringing unconditional financial freedom and control to the next billion users,” said Paul Ferguson, Co-founder of Azteco.
Azteco has plans to go beyond the vouchers. The company plans to simplify the process of buying Bitcoin online in the coming months by doing away with the need for users to create accounts or undergo a thorough KYC procedure. The current transaction places a pre-money valuation of $84 million on the company. For a company that is barely a year old, this shows that investors have a lot of confidence in Azteco’s growth potential.