Pathao founders’ new firm secures $3.8m round led by GFC, Spartan Group

The Wind team / Photo credit: Wind

Hussain Elius and Ahmed Fahad have shifted their focus from Pathao, the Bangladeshi consumer tech firm they co-founded, to their latest venture Wind, a Singapore-based remittance firm powered by the Polygon blockchain.

Their goal is simple: open up the payment corridor between Southeast Asia and the US. For example, users can convert US dollars into USDC stablecoins and send them through blockchain technology to the Philippines before turning the USDC into Philippine pesos.

Recently, Wind raised US$3.8 million in a pre-seed round led by German VC firm Global Founders Capital and Singapore’s blockchain investment firm Spartan Group.

The fundraising also saw participation from Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Tiny VC.

Elius, who also serves as Wind’s CEO, said in an interview with Tech in Asia that the fresh funds will go toward product development, strengthening compliance and licensing measures, and other initiatives.

Wind’s competitors include decentralized finance wallets such as Coinbase and MetaMask, as well as numerous existing remittance services. Wind’s unique selling point is that it’s a non-custodial wallet, which means the firm does not hold customer funds and allows users to manage their own assets.

This model lets the company offer faster and cheaper services, the firm said. Right now, Wind charges less than 0.3% of a transaction’s value, while competitors offering direct money transfers may charge up to 1%, Elius added.

“Anyone anywhere in the world can open up an account and start receiving money. This is very dissimilar to other players we have in the market. This allows us to target literally all over the world,” the CEO stressed.

Indeed, while the company now focuses on Southeast Asian markets, especially the Philippines, it has users from Nigeria, Cambodia, and Estonia, among other places.

Since its establishment in 2022, Wind has reached nearly US$3 million in transaction value. In September, it also received a grant from the XRP Ledger accelerator program launched by Tenity and Ripple.

See also: Could Bangladesh be the next Indonesia?

At Pathao, Elius and Fahad helped turn the company into a diversified super app, covering ride-sharing, food delivery, ecommerce, payments, and logistics, among others.

“We scaled the business from three people in my garage to 2,000 people,” Elius said. “But I left last year to start Wind because I wanted to do something much more regional, much more global in scale.”