Payments platform Mash this week announced a seed funding round. The USD$6 million financing was co-led by Castle Island Ventures and Whitecap Venture Partners.
The round also saw participation from Maple VC, Strategic Cyber Ventures, Aquanow, and Spacecadet Ventures—as well as several angel investors including Amjad Masad, Balaji Srinivasan, Austin Hill, John Pfeffer, and Dean Skurka.
The Toronto-born startup aims to remonetize the internet by enabling builders, creators, and developers to implement new business models to generate revenue for the experiences they deliver—and by extension providing consumers with a digitally native wallet to use everywhere.
Basically, Mash doesn’t want independent creators and innovative tech to rely on lame revenue streams like poorly paying advertisements and consumer-hostile subscription models.
“There’s an explosion in the number of people who want to be full-time creators and builders,” said Jared Nusinoff, founder and CEO of Mash. “But to go full time, they need an easy way to actually monetize the value they deliver.”
To solve this, Mash leverages Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
“Bitcoin and Lightning are transformative, redefining money on a global scale, creating the perfect opportunity for us to change the fabric of all online experiences and unlock fundamentally new business models that reward and incentivize the proliferation of quality, trusted and high-value experiences,” said Nusinoff.
Mash was founded in 2021 and since then has established “a world-class engineering and design team with top tier startup and big tech experience” at companies such as Google, Amazon, and Fitbit.
“Online content monetization is deeply broken today,” said Nic Carter, General Partner at Castle Island Ventures, which led a pre-seed investment in Mash. As a scalable, data-efficient, and high-granularity system, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network is uniquely suited to solving this problem, and Mash employs it wonderfully.”
Carter will join the Mash board of directors.
The company recently launched a beta version of its first product and says it is also in the process of onboarding several partners.
“With the maturation of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, the timing has never been better to commercialize the concept of dynamic digital payments,” said Russell Samuels, Partner at Whitecap Venture Partners. “With tens of millions of developers globally, and hundreds of thousands of new apps launching each year, the potential for Mash is significant.”
Mash noted that the new funds will be used to build out and commercialize its Bitcoin and Lightning Network payments platform as well as grow its team across engineering, marketing, sales, and business development.
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