French startup Multis has raised a $7 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Originally designed as a neobank for companies working with cryptocurrencies, the company has slightly altered its product vision. It now intends to offer the software layer that helps web3 organizations manage their crypto finances.
Other investors in the round include Long Journey Ventures, Sound Ventures, MakerDAO and several business angels, such as Paul Veradittakit, Ryan Selkis and Diogo Monica. Some existing investors also participated once again, such as eFounders, Y Combinator and White Star Capital.
If you run an organization that mostly receives and sends crypto assets and if you want to pay people in cryptocurrencies, chances are you could use something like Multis. When you first sign up, you can connect your Multis account with your Gnosis Safe wallet.
Gnosis Safe is a popular multisig wallet designed specifically for organizations with several people. It’s a smart contract wallet running on Ethereum that you can configure to your needs. For instance, you could require that three different persons validate a transaction when it crosses a certain threshold. They can use a hardware wallet, such as a Ledger wallet, or a software wallet, such as Metamask, to execute transactions.
If you don’t have a Gnosis Safe, Multis can help you create one. The idea is that organizations should remain in control of the private keys of their Gnosis Safe.
“We help customers supercharge their existing Gnosis Safe wallet by adding an all-in-one software layer designed for business,” co-founder and CEO Thibaut Sahaghian told me.
If you hold bitcoins, or you have other Ethereum wallets, you can also add any public key to track external wallets from the Multis interface. While you only get a read-only experience on those wallets, the ability to centralize all your crypto assets means that you can see the full picture when it comes to crypto treasury and cashflow analytics.
One of the biggest pain points for web3 companies is accounting. The startup wants to help you with those pesky tasks as you can categorize transactions as well as add notes and attachments to transactions. When this is done, you can export past transactions in a CSV file. Multis is also working on Quickbooks integration, which should be coming soon.
As for payments, Multis lets you issue mass payments to up to 60 Ethereum addresses. For instance, it could be particularly useful for payroll. The payment feature supports alerts and setting up approval workflows.
“Sending funds to staff is super clunky, as every single transaction has to be processed individually and logged manually. We’re streamlining this payroll process by enabling customers to send funds via a company address book to up to 60 people, on the fly,” Sahaghian said.
And Multis wants to go one step further by creating ramps between the crypto and fiat worlds. In the U.S., Multis users will get traditional USD checking accounts, which could be particularly useful to pay bills and suppliers.
Moreover, Multis customers will be able to order corporate debit cards. Those banking features should be available at some point during the second quarter of 2022.
Behind the scenes, Multis will provide a crypto-to-USD brokerage service. “We partner with a money services business, brokers and an actual bank that is FDIC insured for up to $250,000,” Sahaghian said. For users, everything happens in your Multis account.
Up next, Multis will look at all the financial workflows in a typical organization and try to integrate those workflows in its product. You can imagine more accounting and HR integrations, access to decentralized exchanges, invoicing features, popular DeFi protocols, etc.
Essentially, Multis wants to replace all the tools that aren’t designed for DeFi companies or DAOs, such as shared spreadsheets and consumer dashboards like Zerion. With this vision, Multis could be more than a nice-to-have tool. It could represent a security upgrade for web3 organizations.