South African Crypto Startup Centbee Raises $1M To Facilitate More Cross Border Remittances

With funding from Calvin Ayre, founder of prominent bitcoin venture capital firm Ayre Ventures, Centbee, a London and South Africa-based facilitator of digital currency transfers on the Bitcoin blockchain BSV, has concluded its pre-series A round for $1 million.

Centbee, a company founded in 2017, has created a proprietary digital wallet that utilises the BSV blockchain and facilitates Bitcoin transfers. Lorien Gamaroff, a crypto expert with a primary base in Johannesburg, and Angus Brown, a 20-year banking veteran, founded the company.

Lorien Gamaroff, a crypto expert
Lorien Gamaroff, a crypto expert

Customers can use the cross-border remittances service Minit Money to send digital currency payments to friends and family members who live abroad thanks to Centbee’s crypto infrastructure. Recently, the features roadmap has been increased. Minit Money’s “in-wallet chat application” function is performed by Centbee’s ChatPay feature. Through a second decentralised finance app, the startup also provides a number of digital cash products and services.

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“We rarely hear from remittance providers using crypto, but it’s an area with potential. Traditional remittance providers are hampered by the time delay caused by international finance protocols, mainly SWIFT. Given that crypto uses blockchain for its verification checks, the money arrives much faster and can be held by the recipient as savings or an investment, if they don’t want to acquire fiat for spending,” the company said in a statement. 

The BSV ledger is used by Centbee to permanently record all remittance transactions. Due to a use case that is motivated by usefulness rather than currency speculation, it is marketed as a “real peer-to-peer” electronic cash system for sending Bitcoin.

As jointly appointed chief executives, Gamaroff and Brown are in charge of Centbee. Along with its London headquarters, the firm also has offices in South Africa that support its growth. According to Centbee, 35,000 remittance payments into Africa have so far been made possible.

Calvin Ayre’s contribution follows his firm’s earlier commitment in 2019. The latest investment will support Centbee’s expansion objectives by strengthening its technical and operational capacity.

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Ayre said: “My faith in Centbee has been rewarded through Angus and Lorien’s ongoing commitment to making Bitcoin — the original protocol in the form of BSV — easily usable and accessible to everyone. “

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard