Navra, a blockchain platform founded by SoFi and Figure co-founder Mike Cagney and his spouse June Ou, raised a $19 million Series A to make digital asset services easier to use. Cagney said the company wants to address what he sees as a gap between crypto products and people outside the sector’s native audience, according to Banking Dive’s report.
“The problem that we’ve created in blockchain,” Cagney said, “is we’ve been building for this native crypto audience, but not for the real world.” Navra is designed as a single interface connecting users with multiple blockchain venues. It is available directly and through white-label partnerships, according to the source.
Navra Co-Founder Raises 19M for Blockchain Platform
The platform lets retail users manage cryptocurrency portfolios in one place, with access to lending, borrowing and trading solutions, the company said. Institutional investors can use it to manage enterprise teams. Cagney described the product as an effort to combine a simpler user experience with self-custody and enterprise control.
He contrasted Navra’s aim with two approaches he said already exist. Apps such as Robinhood offer what he called a strong user experience, but users do not self-custody their assets. Wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom give users self-custody, he said, while presenting a steep learning curve for average customers.
Cagney said Navra’s platform was built in a week with help from two artificial intelligence agents. He gave one agent use cases and design practices to produce a prototype. He then asked a second agent to evaluate the experience from the perspective of a 65-year-old SoFi customer unfamiliar with blockchain and identify confusing parts.
The company said about 30,000 people are on its waitlist and that it will begin onboarding them in the coming weeks. That planned onboarding is the next stated step for users waiting to try the platform.
Funding and Lessons From Earlier Companies
Ribbit Capital, Baseline and DCM led the Series A. The three firms were founding investors in Figure. Jump Crypto and Figure Technology Solutions also contributed to the round.
Funding announcements across fintech have also included a stablecoin compliance startup and a larger round involving payments and financial technology firms. The separate deals show other companies raising capital in adjacent parts of the financial technology sector. A separate report on India fintech funding covered capital raised by companies in that market.
Cagney said his experience founding SoFi and Figure informs how he approaches Navra. He said founders learn through early mistakes and can apply those lessons to later companies. At SoFi, he said, a performance-driven culture led to organizational problems. When building Figure, he and early employees spent the first few months discussing what they wanted to do differently.
“At Figure, you have to fit culturally before we even get to the resume,” Cagney said. He described that approach as creating a different organization. He also said that after building Figure and taking it public, he did not want to build another large company.
That preference helped shape Navra’s smaller founding model. Cagney said he saw that he could build with 10 people rather than 100, working with people he had known for years. He called the approach enjoyable and said it avoids the overhead associated with hundreds of employees and many investors.
Navra’s next stated milestone is beginning to onboard its waitlist in the coming weeks. The company’s design and its planned rollout will put its stated goal of making blockchain more accessible in front of users.
