Seattle Based Beamit Receives Funding From Schmidt And Bezos

Seattle-based Beamit, specializes in international money transfers for ordinary people. For the most part, when people wanted to send money to relatives in other countries it often meant spending time in long lines at Wal-Mart or other retail establishments, filling out long forms and waiting for Western Union or Moneygram to take in all the information and then finally the recipient would receive the funds.  This was of course, after paying outrageous fees to the service provider.

Beamit’s founder Matt Oppenheimer discovered this pain first hand while overseeing mobile and internet banking at Barclays Bank Kenya.

“Many Kenyans received money in an old and antiquated way using a cash-based system on both ends but it was an expensive and a painful customer experience,” Oppenheimer told Seattle based tech site Geekwire. “I knew that there was the opportunity to leverage digital channels, including mobile phones, to improve the lives of our customers.”

More after the break



Oppenheimer found that there were ways to harness the power of mobile in order to make the process of sending funds overseas faster, cheaper and more efficient. Many times immigrants from other countries will come to the United States for work and every week send money back home to help their families pay bills. That would mean these people would spend many an hour after work on Friday going through the pains of traditional wire transfer protocols like Western Union and Moneygram.

Two of the most well-known venture capitalists, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have both used their venture capital arms (Google Ventures/Bezos Expeditions), to invest in the Seattle based startup. Beamit’s current round totaled $2.4 million and included the Founder’s Co-op.

Oppenheimer has said that the World Bank estimates that $350 billion dollars is transferred each year with the average transaction being $27 or more.  Xoom (not the Motorola tablet) is Beamit’s primary competitor but obviously with that much money at stake the space is ripe for new ventures.

In emerging markets sending and receiving funds via text message is starting to catch on. This and other forms of mobile money transfer will be the way this industry goes and Beamit is at the forefront of this technology.

source: Geekwire

 

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One comment

  1. 1

    And if someone wants to start a tech start up in the money transfer business as well, use INISMO to create a professional project pitch, collaborate on your project with the team and pitch it to investors directly.

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