In April 2020, Juno had raised $3 million as a part of its seed round from Sequoia India’s accelerator programme, Surge, along with Polychain Capital, Consensys Ventures and Dragonfly Capital.
According to the company, it will be using the funds to beef up its US team across functions of compliance, regulation and marketing; launch and scale its loyalty programme as well as expand its product portfolio across bill payments, tokenised rewards among other forays.
Founded in 2019 by Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma, Juno is a neo-banking platform which provides a checking account for crypto native users. It allows users to accept deposits in its checking account and make payments through its debit card provided by the company in partnership with Evolve Bank and Mastercard.
Juno’s checking account also allows users to make payment through crypto in the real economy through the debit card. It currently helps users make online and offline payment through digital stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) and serves only customers in the US.
Juno has scaled its platform to 75,000 checking accounts and processes $100 million in total payment value (TPV) through its platform every month. This includes deposits, withdrawals as well as payments made through USDC.
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The company is also launching its own token, Juno Coin for its members, which can be redeemed to bump up interest rates for its checking account or increase cash back limits.
Juno also has Juno Pay, a payment gateway for crypto, which simplifies crypto buying experience for users, while providing availability of diversified payment methods such as CashApp, and Venmo.
“We want to grow our tokenised loyalty through two ways. First is by giving it to our community and growing it and the second is through Juno Pay. For Juno Coin, we will be creating a partner network for redemption including a ledger where people can burn it. We expect to grow ten-fold across our metrics in the next 12 months,” said Varun Deshpande, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Juno.
In three months of launch, Juno Pay has already scaled to 100,000 transactions.
The company currently earns revenues for every transaction made online or offline through its debit card.
“We at ParaFi Capital are glad to partner with the team at Juno. They are one of the very few teams we have come across who deeply understand both fintech and crypto. Seamlessly integrating crypto and web3 in a checking account which is a trusted and familiar interface for millions of Americans can help onboard new users to web3,” said Ryan Navi, principal at ParaFi Capital.
Over the next 12 months, the company plans to scale its platform to 1 million users and process $1 billion in TPV on its platform.
