Business
Former SpaceX and X employees raise $9 million for Standard Economics, a platform for the unbanked
Evan Jones first encountered the burdensome world of cross-border payments when he tried to send money to his parents in rural Ireland, encountering steep fees and slow processing times. After learning that the problem is even more pronounced for people who live in developing countries and often lack banking services, he decided to create Standard Economics, a startup designed to erase the hassle typical of international payments.
On Tuesday, Standard Economics announced it has raised $9 million in seed funding in a round led by the crypto venture firm Paradigm, with participation from Lightspeed and strategic angel investors. The startup plans to use the money to build out its app, which it describes as a one-stop shop where people around the world can send cross-border payments, or remittances, as well as access U.S. dollars through stablecoins. Jones declined to disclose the company’s valuation.
“Our product is built to work globally and designed for people traditional finance overlooks,” Jones said. “Our goal is to make it possible for anyone on Earth to access money… and to make it unbelievably easy to use this product.”
Stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the US dollar, are the buzziest technology in crypto at the moment. Congress passed legislation this summer to regulate the technology, and Silicon Valley and Wall Street are exploring integration. And for Jones and Standard Economics, stablecoins are at the center of their vision of making money more accessible to the unbanked.
Standard Economics has three co-founders: Evan Jones, the CEO, who worked at X and xAI; Payam Abedi, the CTO who also worked at X; and Tyler Carnevale, the COO who worked in special projects at SpaceX and X. The company has six employees and is not yet generating revenue.
The Uno App
The company’s debut product is an app called Uno, which is first being launched in Mexico on Tuesday. It’s an iOS and Android app whose goal is to enable people to access a suite of banking tools that would be free for the customer. The app intends to let users make payments internally in the country, and also send money to other countries for free. After launching in Mexico, the company plans to expand Uno to Argentina and to the Philippines, along with several other countries in Latin America and Asia.
Caitlin Pintavorn, a partner at Paradigm, said that in the short-term the company’s competition is apps that already exist in these countries. Félix, for example, is a platform where you can send money to Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras with a WhatsApp message. But she says that these apps change from country to country, whereas Uno would be an app used in many countries across the developing world.
“[Standard Economics’s] vision is to basically bring about Starlink for money,” said Pintavorn.
Jones says that through a prototype of the app he finally found a way to seamlessly send his parents money in rural Ireland.
“My dad was like, ‘you seem to have built a bank,’” Jones said. “And I was like ‘Yes.’”
