Success Stories from Nexo Ventures’ Portfolio
Nexo Ventures – our investment arm for early-stage crypto and Web3 infrastructure projects – has yielded 60+ flourishing portfolio companies since its launch in 2021.
Today, we delve into the exceptional strides made by Zulu and Mizar. These entities, each blazing trails in their respective sectors, perfectly embody Nexo's vision and support in fostering growth and innovation.
- Zulu is transforming cross-border payments in Latin America.
- Mizar is breaking new ground with advanced trading tools.
Join us as we spotlight their achievements, each a testament to the bright future awaiting Nexo Ventures and its portfolio.
Zulu: A Paradigm Shift in Cross-Border Payments
Zulu: A Paradigm Shift in Cross-Border Payments
Colombia-based Zulu is among Nexo’s most promising portfolio companies, following the startup’s $5-million seed round in which Nexo Ventures was a key investor. Following the initial funding round, the Zulu team, led by CEO & Co-founder, Esteban Villegas leverages its strategic partnership with Nexo, revolutionizing the financial landscape of Latin America.
A Business Model Pivot & Growth
Originally designed to help users save securely in “digital dollars” and make cross-border payments without cost, Zulu has morphed into an efficient facilitator for remittances from Latin America to Asia, Europe, and Canada. This strategic shift proved a perfect product-market fit and also fostered rapid growth and innovation within the company. With this shift in business focus, in just six months, Zulu's payment volume skyrocketed to $10 million, marking an impressive twenty-fold increase. Zulu's ambitions and potential show no signs of slowing down. The company aims to increase this figure to a staggering $50 million a month.
Cross-border Payments
Zulu novel cross-border payments infrastructure offers a fresh alternative to the traditional SWIFT payment system. Instead of transferring funds through multiple banks and incurring heavy fees, Zulu enables users to purchase stablecoins in one country, transfer them to another, and then convert them into the required currency. Thus, minimizing costs, eliminating wire fees and focusing only on exchange rates.
Zulu's ongoing success is driven by its ability to identify and serve critical use cases. The platform has become a popular choice for students studying abroad in Europe, who use Zulu to send their monthly fees and living expenses from overseas. Unicorn FinTechs in Latin America have leveraged Zulu's blockchain technology from complex cross-border payments with estimated savings crossing the million dollar mark per year.
As it continues to innovate, Zulu is a testament to Nexo Ventures' knack for investing in game-changing companies poised for extraordinary growth.
Mizar: Novel Trading Tools for CeFi & DeFi
Mizar is a Nexo portfolio company that builds accessible crypto trading tools to help clients improve the way they manage their crypto, both in the CeFi and DeFi world. In 2022, Nexo led Mizar’s seed funding round, facilitating a $3 million investment in the company from various sources and embodying Nexo's commitment to democratize access to quality trading tools in the crypto arena. Our strategic advice and funding have gone a long way with Mizar having become the first platform to provide bots and trading tools for both CeFi and DeFi traders.
Growing Clientbase and Trading
In the last few months, Mizar has seen significant growth in its trading volume and user base with the total traded volume in June having reached $32 million, exceeding that of May 2023. The company also hit a milestone of just shy of 20K users.
Developing Disrupting DeFi Tools
Mizar's latest products focus on on-chain trading bots and include key components like the Mizar Token Sniffer, Sniper Bot and DEX Trading.
The company’s Token Sniffer is one of the first Mizar on-chain analytics tools. It's a free and public tool that empowers users to research the security of any ERC-20 tokens. This tool provides traders with access to advanced information, including contract buy and sell taxes, limits on buy and sell amounts, token owner and creator details, and various other parameters.
The Sniper Bot is an upcoming new tool designed to snipe tokens when they're launched. Traders can search for tokens and set-up their bots to swiftly purchase them as soon as the token can be traded. The sniper bot is equipped with security tools that prevent users from buying tokens that do not adhere to specific parameters, such as buy and sell taxes, liquidity range, minimum and maximum market cap, and more.
Mizar will also be releasing DEX Trading Bots on its platform. Within the coming months, Mizar is poised to launch a bot that enables users to automatically trade with limit orders and use auto stop loss, take profit, and trading options on decentralized exchanges.
These developments are all part of a series of major product releases Mizar is planning throughout Q3 and Q4 of 2023.
Since 2018, Nexo has always been at the forefront, pioneering comprehensive financial services in the world of digital assets. Like every journey we embark on, our Web3-focused investment arm thrives on fostering an ecosystem of game-changing solutions and growth.
With the bold mission to elevate entrepreneurs and help push the crypto revolution forward, our partners are the bedrock of our success. We are proud to have showcased their milestones today and look forward to providing you with even more exciting updates on this front.
