Ansa is a first-of-its-kind digital wallet infrastructure platform for merchants, and it has closed its first round of funding on $5.4m.
Bain Capital Ventures partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi served as the lead investor. Other commitments came from Susa Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, Box Group partner Nimi Katragadda, Wischoff Ventures founder Nichole Wischoff and The Fintech Fund.
Ansa stated that female investors and angels contributed to over 75% of the funding.
The FinTech company stated that credit and debit cards account for 57% of consumer payments in the US, but the true cost to merchants is hidden to the average consumer. Card fees can represent well over 12.5% of the transaction.
Sophia Goldberg and JT Cho founded Ansa after seeing the challenges merchants faced whilst they worked at Adyen and Affirm, respectively.
High payment costs are felt by merchants across categories: from coffee, quick serve, and transportation to vertical platforms, marketplaces, and creator platforms wanting to support micro-transactions. This is even more so for those with unique needs, which Ansa calls HULT merchants (habitual use, low value).
These merchants need to patch together vendors, invest in a cross-team complex engineering project and spend large sums on compliance to get a closed-loop program live. Ansa lets a merchant create a wallet within weeks.
Goldberg said, “Your most loyal customers shouldn’t cost you the most. We want to help merchants strengthen their relationship with their most loyal customers, while still optimising unit economics.”
Through Ansa, merchants can quickly and compliantly launch smooth, digitally native customer balances to increase revenue and decrease cost of payments. It added that customers who keep a merchant balance tend to visit more often and have higher transaction sizes, and cost savings can be funnelled into loyalty programs or marketing to further strengthen that customer relationship.
Bain Capital Venture partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi said, “We believe Ansa can do to closed-loop wallets what Marqeta has done for card-issuing, accelerating adoption by lowering the bar and cost to implement. Today it’s too costly and burdensome for most merchants to offer payment systems that give them control and flexibility while lowering cost. Ansa wants to change that.
“I met Sophia and JT independently and recommended they become co-founders because they are both deep in payments and uniquely well-suited to solving this problem.”
In other PayTech news, Brazilian payment infrastructure platform Belvo acquired Skilopay to bolster its position as an account-to-account payments provider in Latin America.
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