Ansa, a digital wallet infrastructure platform for merchants founded by veterans from Adyen and Affirm, has officially launched following a $5.4 million funding round.
The funding was led by Christina Melas-Kyriazi at Bain Capital Ventures, with contributions from Nimi Katragadda at Box Group, Nichole Wischoff at Wischoff Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, The Fintech Fund, and Susa Ventures.
Ansa aims to tackle the high fees associated with accepting credit and debit card payments in the US, especially for micro-transactions. The platform enables merchants to create wallets that integrate customer balances within their ecosystem.
The company primarily focuses on “HULT merchants,” which refers to those with habitual use and low transaction values. These merchants often struggle with the complexities of vendor management, cross-team engineering projects, and substantial compliance costs to implement a closed-loop payment system.
With Ansa, merchants can reportedly set up a wallet in a matter of weeks rather than months, utilizing a flexible, API-first wallet-as-a-service model.
Currently, Ansa is piloting its services with clients in the coffee and quick-serve sectors.
Founded by Sophia Goldberg, who has experience in product and account management at Adyen, and JT Chow, a former employee at Affirm and Google, Ansa is on a mission to modernize payments. “Overall payments in the US lag behind the rest of the world. We’re focused on helping merchants embed payments in a way that best suits their needs,” says Goldberg.