Y Combinator leads $4.3 million round for multichain wallet Cypher

Multichain web3 wallet Cypher announced a $4.3 million seed round, led by startup accelerator Y Combinator.

The equity deal, which closed in June, also saw participation from OrangeDAO, Samsung Next and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, according to an announcement. Cypher took part in Y Combinator's winter batch last year. 

While Cypher is much like other non-custodial crypto wallets, which allow users to hold, buy, sell and stake crypto, CEO Kuberan Marimuthu said in an interview that his aim was to simplify the design of crypto wallet applications. 

"The user experience is like 20 years behind," he said. 

The wallet also differs from other offerings by including an in-app feature that allows users to bridge assets across EVM and Cosmos chains. Rather than relying on providers such as Ramp or MoonPay, it also provides proprietary support to on-ramp fiat into crypto. Marimuthu said that the acceptance rate for these services with banks can be "extremely low." Cypher is also launching a payment card that allows users to spend their stored crypto. 

Banking partnerships

The startup plans to use the funding to conduct further research and development, product development and pursue possible partnerships with banking institutions. 

The seed stage deal follows other fundraises for crypto wallets. Earlier this month, Jump Crypto led a $5 million round into Aptos-based multisig wallet Msafe. Before that, bitcoin wallet developer Foundation raised $7 million led by Polychain Capital in December and Braavo, a wallet on StarkNet, raised $10 million in October.