FPV and Slow Ventures-Backed Payments Fintech Astra Raises $10 Million

• Astra helps companies make and settle payments faster through embedded APIs. 
• The startup raised $10 million in Series A funding led by FPV and Slow Ventures. 
• After this funding round, Astra plans to boost access to its tech to later stage startups. 

Astra, a fintech startup that's developed technology to allow developers to embed financial automation into existing products, raised a $10 million Series A along with a $30 million line of credit.

FPV Ventures, the firm cofounded by former Google product leader Wesley Chan and Morgan Stanley alum Pegah Ebrahimi, led the Series A round with participation from Slow Ventures and Allegis Capital. CoVenture offered the $30 million line of credit.

Astra's application programming interface or API, makes it faster for companies to add a payments layer to their business and offers quicker and more secure bank-to-bank transfers. It partnered with companies like Plaid and Visa to power some of its services.

Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan started the company in 2016, and took several years to perfect its bank-to-bank transfer solution. It launched its card payment API in 2021.

Akos, Astra's CEO, said the impetus to raise capital came after its card-to-card instant payment solution "went gangbusters."

"We saw a lot of new customer adoption coming, so at the beginning of the summer, we were seeing massive growth and payment volumes," Akos said. "Everything was going really, really fast and really big, so we said, why not ride this growth." 

Astra plans on expanding its engineering and compliance services, including expanding the company from the seven that worked for Astra pre-Series A funding. Akos said the funding, and especially the credit line it got from CoVenture, will be used to extend instant payment services to fintechs in areas like lending, investing and freight forwarding and factoring, and other B2B segments. 

The B2B payments space has seen some growth in the past few months. For example, B2B payments company Hopscotch recently raised $6.1 million in additional funding in March.

Some of Astra's customers include challenger banks Fold and Daylight, and expenses app Tandem. Akos said one of Astra's goals is to move upmarket and begin providing payments services to startups in the later stages. Akos also said they see interest from companies in the freight segment who tend to be in the later stages when they realize they have a payments pain point. 

"We're ready for the big time when it comes to larger customers and larger volumes because we've done all this lead work ahead of time, established the right partners across the board, and we're ready to rocket," Akos said.