mobile-wallet
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PAR Punchh found the money at the register
A loyalty app stumbled over the simplest restaurant ritual: paying the bill. Connecting to the register helped turn Punchh into a $500 million acquisition - and explains its next move beyond loyalty members.
Phantom’s $3 Billion Bet on Fewer Instructions
Crypto asked people to become their own bank. Phantom bet they would prefer an app. A friendly ghost, a Solana beachhead and $268 million in funding have turned that wager into a much bigger ambition.
Airship Bet on Push Notifications. The Real Business Was Everything After the Tap.
The company that helped invent commercial push nearly broke its early data stack. Seventeen years later, Airship sells a broader lesson: the notification is only useful if the experience after it earns the tap.
Coco Wallet
Coco Wallet (YC S19) is a global dollar account powered by stablecoins. Founded by Venezuelan entrepreneur Kevin Charles and his co-founders, it lets Latin American migrants and their families send, spend, save, and earn in digital dollars from a mobile app - combining the simplicity of a neobank like Nubank or Revolut with the freedom of self-custodial Web3, so people can access stable, borderless money without a traditional bank.
MNT-Halan
MNT-Halan is an Egyptian fintech that digitally banks the unbanked and underbanked across emerging markets. Founded by Mounir Nakhla, it combines microfinance, consumer and business lending, buy-now-pay-later, mobile wallets, payments and an FMCG/appliance e-commerce marketplace into a single app, all powered by its proprietary Neuron core-banking technology. It became Egypt's first fintech unicorn in 2023 and now operates across Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and the UAE, having disbursed billions of dollars in loans to millions of customers.
Taptap Send
Taptap Send is a mobile-first remittance app that lets migrants and diaspora communities send money home to Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean quickly and at low cost. Founded in 2018 by Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus - the team behind GiveDirectly and Segovia - the app charges no explicit transfer fee on most corridors, earning instead through a transparent exchange-rate margin, and delivers roughly 95% of payments within three minutes to bank accounts, mobile-money wallets and cash-pickup points across 70+ destination countries.
Fintiv
Fintiv is an Austin-based fintech infrastructure company that builds patented, white-label digital wallet ecosystems for telcos, banks and brands. Formerly known as Mozido, it pioneered the Trusted Services Manager (TSM) system for NFC tap-and-pay and says it has deployed wallet ecosystems across more than 35 countries. Today it positions its stack as a bridge from Web2 payments to Web3, adding digital-asset tokenization, real-time clearing and cross-border rails alongside its long-held mobile-wallet patent portfolio.
Lava.ai
Lava.ai is a San Francisco software company that runs a Realtime AI customer-engagement platform for sports teams, live-event venues, retailers and large enterprises. Its engine ties together ticketing, point-of-sale, mobile wallets, apps, parking and live game feeds through 250+ integrations, then uses AI to deliver personalized offers, membership perks, stored-value rewards and clienteling 'in the moment.' Co-founded by TIBCO founder Vivek Ranadive and former TIBCO executive Wen Miao, Lava counts more than 50 franchises and brands - including the NBA, Real Madrid, the LA Rams and the Cleveland Browns - among its users.
Edge
Edge is a San Diego company building a self-custody, privacy-first mobile wallet for buying, storing, swapping and spending more than 120 cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2014 as Airbitz and rebranded to Edge in 2018, it pioneered a username-and-password login model backed by client-side encryption and a zero-knowledge architecture, so private keys and account data never leave a user's device unencrypted. The same security layer is offered to developers as the Edge Login SDK.