SMC Capital Participates in Seed Round for Enterprise DeFi Solution Helis Network
SMC Capital has invested in Helis Network, which closed a $500,000 seed fundraising round led by NGC Ventures, with additional investments from SMC Capital, Woodstock, Obsidian Capital, and Black Edge Capital.
Helis is building a suite of products geared toward enterprises that want to use blockchain but find the technology too complicated. Entreprise companies that handle large volumes of crypto assets may find distribution and monetization of those assets to be a challenging and time-intensive chore.
Their flagship product is called Payroll, which is an enterprise application that enables easy crypto payments to businesses, employees, freelancers, and investors. Enterprises that pay out salaries or contracts in crypto often spend hundreds of man-hours per month organizing and tracking these payments as well as producing reporting documents for tax purposes. Payroll from Helis automates this process and cuts down the time needed to administer crypto payments significantly. Further, Payroll helps execute bounty payments, distribute vested tokens, automate tax allocations, and provides enterprises with a high-level overview of all integrated wallet balances. Helis expects to integrate fiat payments to Payroll by the end of the year.
According to the company’s website, pilot projects for Payroll have been launched for several large blockchain enterprise clients, including Nexo, Kyber Network, Aion, and Loopring.
The company is also actively developing products geared toward helping enterprises build additional revenue streams from crypto holdings, including a Loan and a Derivatives product. Loans helps enterprises monetize their idle crypto assets by aggregating liquidity providers, like Nexo and Dharma, and identifying the best lending rates. The Derivatives product helps enterprises understand the risks of certain speculative crypto products in a simple way.
SMC Capital Managing Partner John Slyusarev said that “finance is one of the most opportune market segments for blockchain implementation because there are many challenges in finance that are currently addressed by non-efficient solutions. Blockchain can disrupt this segment by delivering better, faster, and more secure service with lower fees. We are convinced that Helis Network has developed a solution that can address the needs of a large part of the market, especially because they have already onboarded institutional and enterprise clients. SMC Capital stands ready to help our newest portfolio company build their business, expand to new markets, and attract new clients and partners.”
As more and more enterprises appear in the blockchain space, SMC Capital expects Helis Network to be the first choice for back office solutions.
