Zabo, a Dallas-based cryptocurrency startup, has announced a $2.5 million funding round led by Moonshots Capital. The capital will be used to expand its engineering team and increase its customer base.

“In the last decade we’ve seen incredible growth in crypto, both as a financial asset and paradigm-shifting technology infrastructure,” Zabo wrote in a company blog post. “Financial and computer science history have already been made. But the best is yet to come—the growth of crypto the next decade will dwarf its prior history.”

Zabo’s technology allows any financial services company—banks, brokerage firms, fintechs—to connect to customers’ crypto wallets. The API integrates with thousands of exchanges, wallets, and cryptocurrencies, which Zabo says are required to power the next generation of financial products and services.

Its solution can be used across the financial services space, including personal financial management, investments, digital banking, tax software, and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Cryptocurrency is an asset class on track to reach billions of customers and measuring in the trillions of dollars, according to Zabo Co-founder Christopher Brown. The marketplace challenge is cryptocurrency is underserved in relation to other financial services because, in part, connecting the different currencies, wallets, and exchanges to the traditional financial system is difficult.

Zabo’s solution takes the complexity out of this integration.

“Cryptocurrency is quickly becoming a mainstream asset class,” said Alex Treece, Zabo’s co-founder and president, in a statement. “Unfortunately, fintechs, banks and brokerage firms have been very challenged to provide services, in part because their current technology doesn’t support cryptocurrency. This comes at a time when the next generation of customers, who prefer to own cryptocurrency more than shares in stocks like Disney and Netflix, are in the process of selecting their primary financial institutions.”

Also participating in the funding round was Blockchange Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Digital Currency Group, CoinShares, Tezos Foundation, Capital Factory, and others. On its site, Zabo said the money will go to three specific things: growing its family, adding more partners and connection into the Zabo API, and increasing customer and partner support.

“Zabo has put together an impressive team and have been experts in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space for years,” Craig Cummings, General Partner at Moonshots Capital, said of the investment. “They have built an incredibly important piece of technical infrastructure that will enable cryptocurrency financial services to touch billions of people.”

Dallas-Fort Worth-based Zabo was co-founded by Brown, CEO; Treece, president; and William Dias, CTO, who operates out of Toronto.

About two years ago, Zabo got a $1.15 million seed investment from New York-based Blockchange Ventures. The funding went toward creating the app, supporting Bitcoin and Ether, and allowing users to have crypto combined with their bank accounts. Last year, Zabo launched Papercrypto, a risk-free simulation designed to “demystify, derisk, and devour cryptoconfusion.” Essentially, it’s a free game that allows anyone to construct a virtual portfolio of cryptocurrencies.

Also last year, Brown was named one of our 26 North Texas innovators who are the future today. He and his team officially launched Zabo in September 2019.

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