Sending money home, minus the middleman's markup. A phone-first remittance app for the corridors legacy providers overlooked.
Global remittances - the money migrants send back to family - top $500 billion a year, more than foreign aid and direct investment into low- and middle-income countries combined. For decades the pipes that carried those dollars were slow and expensive. Taptap Send was built to shrink that cost.
Founded in 2018 by Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus, the app lets people in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and the UAE send money to more than 70 destinations across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Recipients can take delivery as a bank deposit, into a mobile-money wallet they already use, or as cash pickup at partner branches.
The founders arrived with an unusual resume. Before Taptap Send they built GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that hands cash directly to people living in poverty, and Segovia, a business-payments firm acquired by Crown Agents Bank in 2019. Taptap Send was the consumer chapter of the same idea: move money into emerging markets as cheaply and quickly as possible.
The mechanism is deceptively plain. On most corridors there is no explicit transfer fee. Instead the company earns a margin on the exchange rate - and it says so openly. The pitch is not magic; it is honesty about where the cost lives, plus enough back-end engineering to keep that cost low.
"Remittances are deceptively simple on the surface, with exceedingly complicated execution underneath," Faye has said. The company's quiet edge is integration: it plugs into the mobile-money rails recipients already rely on, so the person on the other end never has to download anything.
"We will only build products and strategies in the interest of our customers - even if that means leaving money on the table." - Taptap Send's "impact first" value
The business scales with volume across its corridors. No hidden fee, a transparent rate, and delivery options that meet recipients where they already keep their money - that is the whole model, stated plainly.
Send from six sending regions to 70+ countries on iOS and Android - pick the recipient, the amount, and the delivery method, and go.
Deposits straight into local mobile-money wallets like M-Pesa, Orange Money and MTN. No app needed on the receiving end.
Automatic bank-account deposits, plus cash pickup at partner branches in select corridors.
Fund a transfer directly from a linked bank account via instant bank transfer, powered by Plaid in supported markets.
Migrants and diaspora communities across North America, Europe, Australia and the Gulf, sending money to family in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Taptap Send says it is trusted by millions of customers and has moved billions of dollars since launch.
Legacy remittance can be slow, opaque and costly - a quiet tax on the people who can least afford it. Taptap Send targets the underserved corridors big players underprice or ignore, and tries to make each dollar sent arrive nearly whole, fast.
Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus spin out a consumer remittance app focused on underserved emerging-market corridors.
The founders' B2B payments company is bought by Crown Agents Bank; Taptap Send continues as its own venture.
As cash grows risky and digital payments become essential, the business grows roughly eightfold.
Co-led by Canaan Partners and Reid Hoffman, with Omidyar Network and Helios.
Led by Spark Capital, with Unbound, Slow Ventures, Breyer Capital, Wamda Capital and Flourish Ventures - taking total raised past $80M.
Taptap Send competes with Western Union, MoneyGram, Wise, Remitly, WorldRemit and Sendwave. Its differentiator is focus: rather than chase every route, it concentrates on emerging-market corridors many rivals underserve, and leans on mobile-money integration plus transparent pricing to win trust in those markets.
Sources: company site, TechCrunch, Crunchbase, Tracxn, Profee, MoneyTransfers.com. Figures are approximate where noted.