Remitly: On a mission to improve mobile money transfers
by Bill Bryant
At DFJ, we have a long history of investing in mission inspired, purpose driven startups, where the entrepreneur is in the immortal words of the Blues Brothers, “on a mission from God”. Past examples include SpaceX, Tesla, and Skype. Today, we are proud to announce our investment in Remitly, www.remitly.com, which we hope joins these and other DFJ backed portfolio companies that truly changed the world and made it a better place.
Remitly’s origins date back to Co-founder and CEO Matt Oppenheimer’s experience working for Barclays in Kenya and other parts of eastern Africa. While in Africa, Matt experienced firsthand the many challenges that immigrant workers (of which there are now over 200 million world wide, or about 7% of the global workforce) had when transferring a portion of their wages back to friends, family and business colleagues in their home countries. Not only was it far too expensive with fees eating approximately 8% of the transferred value, but also inconvenient to find an agent and physically go to wherever you could transmit or receive funds. It was also slow, with up to several days for the transfer to clear, and oftentimes unreliable with lots of glitches, declines, and problems.
Matt also observed how in these developing economies, everyone had a mobile phone, increasingly a smart phone — more so than they had a bank account with Barclays! Upon Matt’s return to Seattle, he had an idea to transform the $530 billion global cross border money transfer market by creating a beautiful user experience, on mobile, that charged less, and reliably sent the money in a matter of minutes.
Matt joined the Techstars Seattle 2011 cohort, where I had the pleasure of mentoring him during the program. Another of his mentors was Josh Hug, then at Amazon, who I had known as the CEO and founder of Shelfari, a book lover’s community acquired by Amazon. I was an angel investor in Shelfari so had known Josh for several years. Josh loved what Matt was working on so much that he quit his job at Amazon and joined Remitly as co-founder and chief product officer, which made for a great Demo Day announcement!
While I missed the Series A round for Remitly, I stayed in close touch with the company tracking their progress. Late last year, Matt and Josh approached me about DFJ leading their next round of financing, which we quickly agreed to do. The company is growing explosively in its targeted geographies, nearly doubling its transfer volume to $100 million annualized over the past several months. With a half trillion-dollar market to tackle, we expect Remitly to continue to eat away at incumbents based on the combination of best product experience by far, as well as the convenience, speed, trust and lower fees offered to customers.
DFJ couldn’t be more thrilled to extend a warm welcome to Remitly as one of our Fund XI portfolio companies. We’re honored to be part of Matt and Josh’s mission to truly make the world a better place through the application of technology.
