Sequoia-backed Multis rolls out corporate cards to facilitate crypto treasury spending: Exclusive

Web3 startup Multis hopes to help businesses and entrepreneurs more easily spend from their crypto treasuries with the rollout of corporate cards and checking accounts. 

"We're selling a cure here,” Multis CEO Thibaut Sahaghian said in an interview. “If you talk to any entrepreneurs in the space, you will see how vivid their emotions are. It's insanely hard to build a business. It's even seemingly harder to deliver with crypto, and we're here to relieve and to help those entrepreneurs.” 

The crypto treasury service was launched in partnership with Mastercard and has been tested by over 100 crypto businesses including Sky Mavis, Orange DAO and Audius. 

Multis' origins

Multis was founded in 2019 and participated in the summer 2019 Y Combinator batch. It has since taken two product pivots and conversations with over 150 crypto entrepreneurs to home in on solving the problem of helping crypto companies manage and spend from crypto treasuries, Sahaghian said.

The startup raised $7 million earlier this year to build out this vision from investors including Sequoia, White Star Capital and Y Combinator. 

"There was a pain,” Sahaghian said. “If we talk about Sky Mavis for example, they were relying on multiple MetaMask wallets, multiple Gnosis-safe wallets, multiple spreadsheets and multiple full-time employees to manage just very simple payment flows.” 

A competitive landscape

Multis isn’t the first company to offer corporate cards and treasury management to entrepreneurs and underserved businesses. Web2 players like Brex and Ramp have been providing these services for years.  

Brex recently wound down its expansion into traditional small-to-medium businesses due to the increasing demands of serving its core customer base of venture-backed startups in a tougher economic environment. 

Sahaghian isn’t worried about a traditional player like Brex or American Express eating Multis’ lunch. 

“For now, the market is either too small or too complex for them to really understand the narrative and the problems that they need to be fixing,” Sahaghian said. 

The nitty-gritty

U.S.-registered web3 companies will be able to apply in less than 10 minutes and it will take less than a day to get approved, the company said in a blog post. The cards and accounts will be free to businesses. Multis earns revenue from transactions such as crypto to fiat and vice versa, Sahaghian said. 

"We as the distribution partners of Mastercard,  we monetize through those interchange fees, which [enables] us able to provide for free our corporate cards to customers," Sahaghian said. 

Approved companies also will gain access to advanced features such as issuing multiple corporate cards to employees and vendors as well as tracking tools.

“I do think that Multis is actually a cure, not just a piece of software,” Sahaghian said. “We like to think that we are offloading teams of frustration and anxiety. We're basically providing peace of mind.”