Plenty of young people launch startups, but Rodri Fernández Touza may be the first to jump into crypto from a monastery. In 2021, he abandoned his postgraduate studies at Stanford and Harvard University to live as a Buddhist monk in upstate New York. While Touza enjoyed meditation, it was the midst of the NFT craze, and he was too excited about the market to stay on the sidelines. “I was in the temple with everyone else, and I couldn’t think of anything else but building,” he told Fortune.
After four months, Touza left the monastery, and, in 2022, he launched Crossmint, a platform for developers to add crypto functionality to their code. On Tuesday, he announced that his company had raised $23.6 million across a seed, series A, and strategic funding round.
Ribbit Capital, the fintech venture capital firm, led the startup’s series A. Other investors in the round include Franklin Templeton, Nyca, First Round, and Lightspeed Faction. Touza declined to disclose at what valuation he raised the funds. His investors received equity, not promised cryptocurrency, he said. (Many crypto companies give VCs warrants for yet-to-be-released tokens.)
Touza and his cofounder Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas, who are both from Spain, are engineers by training, and have built Crossmint to appeal to software engineers. It provides programmers with a toolbox to more easily integrate crypto technology into their applications. This means that, instead of wading through the technicalities of how to launch a program on the Ethereum blockchain or create a wallet to store a user’s Bitcoin, programmers can instead use a shortcut by plugging into Crossmint’s APIs.
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are mainstays in software engineering and allow developers to use other programmers’ code without the need to understand every command in a file with thousands of lines of text. API providers aren’t the most eye-grabbing businesses, but they’re attractive to VCs. Alchemy, another API-based crypto development platform, raised $250 million at a $10.5 billion valuation in February 2022.
Crossmint’s product is akin to Alchemy’s, but its target customers are more traditional tech firms, fintechs, and banks, said Touza. “We serve a lot of very large institutions, whereas they focus a bit more on startups,” he said, in reference to Alchemy.
So far, Crossmint has landed 40,000 companies and developers as customers, including Adidas, Red Bull, and Coinbase, Touza said. Crossmint’s APIs for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency whose value stays pegged to a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar, are one of the platform’s draws, said Touza. His clientele are also equipping AI bots with the ability to autonomously send and receive cryptocurrency. Subscriptions to Crossmint increased 1,100% from January to December 2024, but Touza wouldn’t disclose his company’s revenue or whether Crossmint is profitable.
“Once you start a company, there’s like a decade of where you cannot do anything else,” he told Fortune. In other words, Touza doesn’t have plans to return to a monastery anytime soon.