Former Revolut employees raise $3.5 million to build crypto investment app

Former Revolut employees have raised $3.5 million to build a crypto investment app — in a round led by Index Ventures — as the European fintech giant continues to see its alumni create crypto projects. 

CoinFund and FJ Labs also participated in the round, which closed in January and valued the startup at $17.5 million. Since then, founders Ayelen Denovitzer and Shailendra Sason — who met while working on Revolut's crypto operations — have been busy building Solvo, which aims to simplify crypto investment tools. 

"It's very hard for people with a lack of technical knowledge to start using these products that are actually better than traditional banking," said Denovitzer in an interview with The Block. "To be frank, the consumer solutions that are out there are very focused on buying and selling tokens and don't focus on other aspects of crypto that are super valuable." 

One of these areas which Denovitzer believes has not yet been brought to mainstream attention is staking. Solvo's Vault product allows users to earn a yield of up to 8% on coins, such as SOL and ADA, via staking. Its "Bundles" product allows users to invest in several tokens related to decentralized finance, the metaverse and gaming. 

Solvo's waitlist — which currently has 5000 people — opened earlier this week. The app is set to launch on iOS in October.

The news follows in the footsteps of other startup raises in the web3 sector from former Revolut employees. Earlier this month, former Revolut chief revenue officer Alan Chang raised $78 million for his web3 energy startup, Tesseract. Revolut's former head of crypto, Soups Ranjan, also recently raised $52 million in a round led by a16z for his fraud detection startup, Sardines — which serves customers such as FTX, Blockchain.com and Brave.