coinbase-ventures
(3)
Reku
Reku is an Indonesian investment platform that lets everyday users buy, sell and trade cryptocurrency alongside US stocks and ETFs from a single app. Founded in 2017 as Rekeningku.com and rebranded to Reku in 2022, the company positions itself as a low-fee, education-first exchange licensed by Indonesian regulators. It offers spot crypto, crypto futures, staking, OTC services and curated Reku Packs, and turned profitable in 2024 while serving hundreds of thousands of customers.
Sphere Labs
Sphere Labs is a Boston- and Delaware-based fintech building the payments infrastructure for the stablecoin economy. Founded in 2022 by Arnold Lee and Luigi Charles, the company runs two products: SpherePay, a B2B cross-border payments API that moves money using a 'stablecoin sandwich' - converting local currency into a stablecoin, routing it across borders, then settling into the destination currency in 15-30 minutes; and SphereNet, a 'sovereign-grade' settlement ledger built on the Solana Virtual Machine for regulated financial institutions. Often described as a 'Stripe for crypto,' Sphere pairs developer-friendly APIs and SDKs with embedded compliance to help fintechs, institutions and businesses in emerging markets move value fast, transparently and legally. It raised a $5M strategic round in December 2024 led by Coinbase Ventures and Kraken Ventures.
Arnold Lee
Arnold Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere Labs, the software company behind SpherePay, a cross-border stablecoin payments API, and SphereNet, a Solana-virtual-machine settlement ledger built for regulated fintechs. A Columbia computer science grad who first stumbled into Bitcoin in 2009 trying to buy video games, he spent his early career in embedded systems for IoT startups before incorporating Sphere a week after the FTX collapse, off the back of a global Stripe hackathon win and a stint in Jump Crypto's incubator. Sphere now moves billions in annual volume through corridors legacy banking forgot - Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East - on the thesis that every payments company eventually becomes a compliance company.