Hello world! Today, we’re excited to be introducing Rain, the first corporate card built for Web3 teams from the ground up. Tens of billions of dollars worth of crypto is trapped in the wallets of DAOs, startups, and NFT projects without an easy pathway to spend them on fiat expenses. Rain is unlocking these wallets to spend crypto at millions of merchants worldwide. We are on a journey to provide access to business tooling for the millions of builders in Web3.
To help us on this journey, we have assembled some of the best Web3 and fintech investors around. We are excited to announce we have closed a $6 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Alliance DAO, Circle Ventures, Terraform Labs, Mischief Fund, Coinbase Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Uniswap Labs, and Canonical. We have an inspiring group of angels joining this round as well including Balaji Srinivasan (Former CTO of Coinbase), Paul Veradittakit (Partner at Pantera), Shrisha Radhakrishna (CTO of LegalZoom), Jeth Soetoyo (Founder of Pintu), Clayton Gardner (Co-Founder of Titan), and Amber Atherton (Head of Strategic Communities at Discord).
— Farooq & Charles
Our Journey
The journey to building Rain started last May when we were tinkering on signandwire.com, a tool to help founders automate their fundraising. While building that product, we became frustrated with the traditional financial system’s reliance on ACH and wires as payment rails. This frustration led us to experiment with USDC as a funding option. As we talked to Web3 founders about what we were working on, we learned about the problems they had with spending the crypto capital they had already raised. While their expenses looked the same as any other startup: laptops, SaaS tools, cloud computing, travel, etc., most of these merchants were not accepting crypto as payment. These founders were doing all kinds of crazy things to make it work, from putting all spending on their personal cards to waiting months to open up accounts at centralized exchanges and banks just to get told “no” after filling out pages and pages of forms. We quickly realized that a native spending rail for corporate capital was missing from Web3 and got excited about the opportunity of working in service of the amazing teams that are building the future of finance, decentralization, the metaverse, and art. So here we are, announcing Rain to do just that.
What is Rain
Rain is the corporate card for Web3 We’re the card for DAOs, the card for protocols, the card for networks, and the card for projects. The card was built for how Web3 teams are governed and operate. Today Rain is linked to your USDC balances and enables spending in fiat at merchants worldwide. Long-term, Rain will enable teams to go from idea to scale without skipping a beat and ever needing a fiat bank.
Rain is a community of builders Rain is curating and serving the best teams in Web3. We’re built for the innovators and the pioneers of the decentralized web. We’re building a community of the best founders in the space with a view to facilitating conversations and collaborations amongst the best. Web3 is about community and Rain members join a community of the best builders globally.
Rain is the future of finance When we set out to build Rain, we realized that many fintech products are still limited by the archaic infrastructure behind the scenes. The same old SFTP uploads, the same old manual reconciliations, and the same old business hours. At Rain, we’re leveraging the newest technology and DeFi infrastructure to deliver products that are not possible today. Rain members already can spend in real life faster than they can get a 2FA text message from a centralized exchange. That’s just the beginning.
Become a Rain Member
If you want to learn more, check out our website at raincards.xyz. We’re currently onboarding folks off the waitlist (bonus points if you get referred by an existing member). Please reach out if you’d like a demo of the product!