Many young people start up startups, but Rodri Fernandez Tousa may be the first to jump into code from the monastery. In 2021 he abandoned his graduate studies at Stanford and Harvard University and lived as a Buddhist monk K in upstate New York. Touza enjoyed meditation, but was in the midst of the NFT trend. He was so excited about the market that he couldn’t stay on the sidelines. “I was in the temple with everyone else. I couldn’t think of anything except the building,” he told Fortune.
Four months later, Touza left the monastery and in 2022 launched Crossmint, a platform for developers to add cryptographic features to their code. On Tuesday, he announced that his company had raised $23.6 million in Seed, Series A and strategic funding rounds.
Ribbit Capital, a fintech venture capital firm, leads the startup Series A. Other investors in the round include Franklin Templeton, NYCA, First Round and Lightspeed Facion. Touza refused to disclose what assessment he funded. His investors received fairness rather than the promised cryptocurrency, he said. (Many crypto companies offer VCS warrants for tokens that have not yet been released.)
Touza and his co-founder Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas, both of whom are from Spain, are engineers in training, and have built cross mint to appeal to software engineers. Provides programmers with a toolbox for easy integration of Crypto technology into applications. This means that instead of stacking up techniques for how to launch programs on the Ethereum blockchain or adhering to how to store your Bitcoin and create wallets, programmers can instead use shortcuts by connecting to Crossmint’s API.
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are the flagship of software engineering, allowing developers to use code from other programmers without having to understand all the commands in files with thousands of text. API providers are not eye-catching businesses, but they are attractive to VCS. Alchemy, another API-based cryptographic development platform, raised $250 million in February 2022 at a $10.5 billion valuation.
Crossmint’s products are similar to Alchemy’s products, but Touza said its target customers are more traditional high-tech companies, Fintechs and banks. “We serve many very large institutions, but they focus a little more on startups,” he said in connection with alchemy.
So far, Crossmint has landed 40,000 companies and developers as customers such as Adidas, Red Bull and Coinbase, Touza said. Stablecoins’ Crossmint API is a kind of cryptocurrency whose value is fixed in Fiat currency like the US dollar, and is one of the platform’s draws, Touza said. His customers are also equipped with the ability to autonomously send and receive cryptocurrency to AI bots. Although subscriptions to Crossmint increased by 1,100% between January and December 2024, Touza did not disclose the company’s revenue.