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Terence Lee · · 5 min readHow this rarest of crypto startups is shrugging off winter
Additional reporting by Fang Wei Lee
It’s one thing to resign from a crypto startup that you started under a cloud of controversy. It’s another to establish a new company soon after that and profitably bring your latest venture to over US$65 million in quarterly revenue within two years.
By the yardsticks of stratospheric crypto valuations – and arguably the general tech industry before the crash – this company could easily be in unicorn territory.
Cake DeFi co-founders Dr. Julian Hosp (left) and U-Zyn Chua / Photo credit: Cake DeFi
And that’s not all: The company, which focuses on decentralized finance (DeFi), has achieved all this without raising venture capital money. Instead, it has launched a US$100 million VC arm. It also declared that it is cash flow positive in June, just days after major crypto lender Celsius freezed withdrawals and Bitcoin prices tumbled by 26%.
It’s rare that a startup can have its cake and eat it, too. But that’s what Cake DeFi, a Singapore-based crypto savings and lending app, seems to have done.
To be sure, the comeback story of Julian Hosp, Cake DeFi’s CEO and co-founder, is still being written. But his ship appears to be steady even as waves of liquidations and bank runs have hit other lenders.
“By the end of the year, Cake will have more than doubled the team size we had at the beginning of 2022,” he tells Tech in Asia.
What sets Cake DeFi apart from Celsius
Every Jobs needs a Wozniak. For Hosp, that person is U-Zyn Chua, a familiar name in Singapore’s developer community.
Besides being the CTO and co-founder of CakeDefi, Chua is also the lead researcher of DeFiChain, a blockchain built on top of Bitcoin.
Chua and Hosp worked on DeFiChain, which now has a market value of US$565 million, at around the same time they developed CakeDeFi.
The platforms are complementary: CakeDeFi is a “centralized” service that accepts customers’ credit cards and acts as a custodian of their funds, allowing them to easily access DeFiChain’s offerings without needing to download a crypto wallet.
Image credit: Cake DeFi
Looking beyond Bitcoin
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Cake DeFi said that it hit US$65 million in quarterly revenue just two years after it started. And that’s not all it’s touting.
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