Investing in Coala Pay

Stablecoins are crypto’s biggest baddest hammer and that hammer should be looking for nails - with Coala Pay we believe we found a nail. Today we are excited to announce we are leading a pre-seed round into Coala Pay, a stablecoin protocol for last-mile delivery of international aid - a large stubborn nail indeed.

International Aid is massive ($200B+) but relatively obscure and ignored market, for good reason. The aid space is notoriously difficult to navigate and the people who do know how to navigate it tend not to gravitate toward entrepreneurial ventures, especially crypto ventures. Aid organizations face a variety of challenges in delivering funding to local projects in often war-torn regions. Between selecting projects and actually delivering the funds, there are a myriad of middlemen, foreign currency issues, and bank charges, which reduce the effectiveness of organizations like the UN & USAid. Very little technology has been built to date to address these challenges, instead, the industry relies on costly consultants and service-based businesses - Coala Pay strives to change that.

Coala Pay is building a full-stack solution for aid organizations to verify and deliver aid to local projects in target regions. Non-Governmental organizations are then able to deliver funds via stablecoins making payments faster and more efficient than going through traditional banking rails, rails that are often shut off due to banking restrictions or corruption. Beyond payments, Coala Pay is able to track the success of dollars delivered and provide traceability of funds, something very much lost in the opaque international aid industry. Coala Pay is even working on more experimental designs like incorporating oracles for off-chain events like weather to deliver aid to farmers stricken by weather catastrophes.

It takes a special type of founder to be able to not only recognize the challenge but understand the solution. Melyn McKay, the founder of Coala has been working in the international aid space for more than a decade with time spent in challenging geographies like Myanmar and South Sudan. Melyn developed the idea for Coala after struggling with getting money into closed-off markets, going as far as having to transport paper bills from Dubai to Juba without any security.

We are thrilled to be backing Coala Pay and believe it can be a hero of an example of the power of blockchains. If you are interested in learning more or partnering with Coala Pay, please reach out.