Why we invested in Bridge
Bridge recently introduced themselves to the world after 2.5 years of building. The team published an excellent article describing the problem they are solving and the money movement platform they’ve built. Their unveiling was also covered in an exclusive by Fortune which highlighted the company’s recent $40M funding round led by Sequoia and Ribbit, contributing to $58M in total funding.
I first met Bridge’s founder, Zach Abrams, in 2022 and joined the company’s cap table in early 2023 as a seed investor. It’s been remarkable to see Zach’s vision and tenacity define an entirely new category of financial services, with over $5 billion in annualized payment volume processed to date. I’d like to share a few excerpts from our February 2023 investment memo about why we decided to invest:
Opportunity: The opportunity is the most compelling I’ve seen among new entrants in the stablecoin space. If longstanding trends in the evolution of money hold, tokenization will be essential to achieving the greater efficiency, speed, interoperability, and portability of money that is necessary for a financialized society to function in a digital native manner. While there are others working to build innovative stablecoin products, Bridge is the only one pursuing a decidedly developer-first strategy, aiming to be the best-in-class pick and shovel that developers automatically reach for when they want to build money and payment experiences. If stablecoins, or (put more simply) tokenized fiat currency, continue their ascent and become the next big payments system, it’s not hard to imagine Bridge becoming as large as any of the major payments companies of today.
Product: The team of five is currently focused on enabling stablecoin orchestration and issuance. The orchestration product focuses on providing a universal set of APIs for developers to convert any form of dollar to any other form of dollar. Issuance refers to a set of APIs for developers to mint stablecoins. So far Bridge is seeing demand around a variety of use cases, including point of sale purchases, international contractor payments, payroll, and peer-to-peer payments.
Team: The two founders of the company, Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, are both Coinbase alumns, in addition to other relevant experience in the fintech sector. Zach has a product management background having worked in roles at Square, Remind, and most recently as Chief Product Officer at Brex. At Coinbase he was Head of Product for consumer products. Sean has an engineering background, with relevant experiences at Square, DoorDash, and Airbnb. They are seasoned veterans of the fintech space with crypto-native credibility. This combination is an important asset as they seek to make stablecoins more accessible to the masses and not only the crypto community. Another key member of the team is Eric Weingarten, who recently joined as CLO and CCO and previously held legal roles at Truework, Coinbase, Tesla. This is an exceptionally strong leadership team that contains all of the attributes a crypto company will need to navigate a difficult marketplace and regulatory environment and produce long-term enduring value.
One of the most compelling aspects of Bridge has been their relentless focus on making stablecoins useful outside of the crypto ecosystem. They have given us a glimpse of the future with tokenized fiat currency abstracted in the background of the next generation of digital money applications. From aid disbursements for the US Government, to fintech apps in emerging markets, to cross border money movement for businesses, Bridge has created an entirely new category of finance, the stablecoin payment system.