Stellar Community Fund

By Kura

Kura for cross-border payments

SCF #27

$27.3K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

We create transparency and impact by reducing cash use and enabling merchants in LAC to get paid directly at their points of sale

Products & Services

Kura participated in the Stellar Startup Camp from April 22 - April 25th 2024. Kura is also a Techstars portfolio company and is currently participating in the Techstars Payments powered by Stellar and Moneygram. US based Immigrant communities who send money to their relatives abroad are often financially distressed by recurring requests from relatives, but have no visibility on how the remittances sent are spent. They pay expensive fees on each transaction and are looking for a long term solution to reduce recurring requests and find a peace of mind. The platform serves millions of immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean sending more than $60B dollars back home each year. Kura provides instant spending for recipients of cross-border payments and Kura increases transparency by providing labeling on remittance usage using a closed-loop payment mechanism between immigrants (senders), the remittance (receiver), and local service providers (vendors), that enables senders to assign a specific purpose for the transfer. Kura is a digital remittance and payment platform leveraging a SAAS model that allows remittance receivers to use a QR code in a closed-loop payment at their local points of sale for the exchange of goods and services after receiving a transfer from senders. Using Stellar, we help merchants settle their payments instantly. In the longer term, we aim to leverage Stellar to power both online and offline payments for underserved markets where traditional payments rails are lacking significantly. A few use examples: incumbents who want to leverage digital/online payments, tech startups who want to accept digitally and serve customers in these local regions, and NGOS/Philanthropic organizations who need to serve beneficiaries in receiving countries. Problem: Inefficient cross-border payment systems lead to repetitive manual transactions for beneficiaries, limit sponsor choice in fund utilization across vendors and markets and lack transparency regarding expenditure within specific market segments or categories. Kura will leverage Stellar to facilitate the instant settlement of funds to SMB vendors and merchants onboarded to the platform.

Requested Budget

$27.3K

Team

Stéphanie Joseph (CEO) earned her MBA from Harvard Business School and brings a wealth of experience in financial services and fintech/payments from working between Ernst & Young, American Express. She spent her early career helping top financial services companies adopt products and technologies to streamline their operations and reduce costs. At HBS she focused on fintech/tech startups in global markets and worked with venture-backed startups across the UK, Kenya, and South Africa.

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniejoseph19/)

Clifford Nau(COO) earned his MBA from MIT Sloan and built the first tech-incubator in the Caribbean region back in 2017. He has raised and allocated up to $2M in funding across multiple tech startups, acted as senior advisor to government officials of the regions of the Caribbean and Central American, on financial inclusion, remittances, and digital economy. Linkedin: We are best positioned to solve this intractable problem given the diversity of our background, our skill sets, and our network in the ecosystems that we’ll serve in the US, Central America and the Caribbean regions. We are currently participating in the Techstars Payments powered by Stellar and Moneygram.(https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffordreginaldnau/