Portland-based Fintech Platform, Sila Raises $7.7 Million

Sila, the Portland-based programmable fintech payments startup has raised $7.7 million as its seed round in order to grow payments API platform. The new round has been led by Madrona Venture Group and Oregon Venture fund along with the participation of 99 Tartans, Madrona Capital, Taavet Kintikus, entrepreneur Jerry Neumman, and the Co-founder and CEO of Transferwise, Taavet Hinrikus.
According to Sila, the platform will use the fund to accelerate growth, filling out more of its API offerings, expanding its customer base, and introduce new product features so that it would get easier for software developers to access the global financial system.
Sharmir Karkal, the Founder and CEO of Sila states, “The global financial system is broken — despite the global payments industry being $1.9 trillion in revenue, it doesn’t serve consumers, small businesses or the innovators trying to reach them. It is too expensive, inefficient, tightly regulated and difficult to integrate into FinTech applications.”
In the latest round, it has been decided that Rick Holt, the lead investor at Oregon Venture Fund and Hope Cochran, the Managing Director of Madrona will join the Sila board, while Sila has inked Matt Compton, the General Partner at Oregon as a board observer.
According to Shamir, the team of Sila is currently focusing on reliability and scalability due to which the team has decided to start with Ethereum as a base, rather than rolling their own solution. He states, “Speed is always a relative thing — you get transactions on Ethereum in like one or two minutes, which is not two seconds, but it’s still way better than two days for an ACH transaction.”
Shamir also said that in the near future, users will be able to choose and pick that ledger technology which they might wish to use.