Crypto banking firm Juno has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round led by ParaFi Capital, a crypto-native investment firm. The funds will reportedly be used by the startup which offers crypto checking account services to offer a wider range of products and operations and also to launch its first tokenized loyalty program.
The funding, announced on 1 October, has scores of other backers in addition to ParaFi. Antler Global, Greycroft, Jump Crypto, Hashed, Mithril, 6th Man Ventures, Abstract Ventures, and Uncorrelated Fund are some of the other funders.
The latest funding round gives a boost to the startup and the evolution of checking accounts. Before this, Juno had acquired $3 million through a seed funding round in 2020. Sequoia India’s Surge, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, Consensys Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Surojit Chatterjee, Sandeep Nailwal, and Ryan Selkis joined in to back the firm at the time.
The company also launched a new token that is meant to serve as a loyalty program of sorts. JCOIN, short for Juno coin, will only be distributed to 70k+ verified account holders. The token is an ERC20 token. Like credit card rewards points, JCOIN will be given to members who use their Juno accounts to earn or spend in crypto.
In addition, it provides exclusive and exciting offers, collectibles, and in-app boosts redeemable through JCOIN, on the Juno Store.
About Juno
Juno is a Web 3.0 crypto firm that offers customers checking accounts tied to crypto assets. The startup was originally founded in 2019 by Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma, who together also created the Ethereum lending protocol Nuo. In just a couple of years, Juno amassed over 75,000 customers in the US. These customers take their salaries both partially and entirety in crypto and consistently invest in digital assets.
In just over a year and a half, Juno reached over $1 billion in annualized transaction volume processing, Varun Deshpande, co-founder and chief executive of Juno, told TechCrunch.
