Learnings from the Tesseract journey from an idea to a $25M investment round

Tesseract announced their $25M round last week. The Tesseract journey has not been a straight line since the founding in 2018 like startup journeys rarely are.

Yichen is the founder of Tesseract; he has the attributes you’d look for in a great founder: he moves fast, learns fast and has been chasing a large vision that has pushed the company to build something big. As we like to invest in domain experts, Yichen fit our thesis well there as well: he has a background in consulting and finance and he could understand how crypto was developing and how to bridge the crypto and traditional finance worlds. These are all things that got us excited in 2018 when Tesseract was just two people and an idea.

However, there’s one thing that really sets Yichen apart from many during this journey, and I would call it honesty.

We’ve heard Yichen say “this isn’t working” many times. He was always really honest and blunt about it. Sometimes even so blunt and early that it surprised everyone in the room when he said it.

The power in that was that it gave the whole team (3–5 people) the chance to take a blank slate and try something new. They didn’t have to bang their heads against the wall to try to make something work that just wasn’t working well enough. They always went back to their customers, their drawing boards and came back with something new that was well thought-out. Looking back it was quite exciting when Yichen and Ilkka would walk into the meeting room with something new to talk about. They didn’t go super far from what they had started with, maybe once but then discarded that test when they noticed in a couple of weeks that that wasn’t resonating. The vision stayed the same all the time and they were leaning on their own strengths and learnings but just went deeper.

When I discussed this with Yichen he wanted to emphasise the stubbornness in pursuing a goal.

“I think the key contributing factor to get us to where we are today is my ability to just not take no as an answer to anything. We always find a way to get to the destination regardless of how tough the journey is.”

We want to congratulate Yichen, Ilkka and the whole Tesseract team. We are proud to continue supporting you going forward! It’s only the beginning.

Read the Tesseract fundning announcement here: https://tesseractinvestment.com/series-a/

And a great writeup with more insight from the lead investor Augmentum Fintech: https://augmentum.medium.com/tesseract-marvel-of-the-crypto-space-b454eab96a7a