This month, the Miami startup raised $3.5M from Atomic
The first time software engineer Jeff Krantz bought Bitcoin – over 10 years ago – the whole transaction was a bit unpleasant. After a colleague told him to check it out, Krantz went home and bought one BTC for $35 on eBay. The seller then sent Krantz directions on how to set up a wallet.
“An hour later, I heard this little noise on my computer: a ping of Bitcoin hitting my wallet,” Krantz told Refresh Miami. “I realized at that moment that this is something different. That if I lose my private key to this wallet, the funds are gone.”
From then on, Krantz was hooked. He has had a front row seat to the ups and downs of the crypto space, from Mt. Gox to FTX and everything in between. He worked as a trading firm that was spinning up a crypto trading desk and worked as a freelancer, writing smart contracts and web3 front ends.
Then one day a college friend got in touch with Krantz and shared that the friend got his Bored Ape stolen. “Having to explain that to him gave me a sinking feeling.” Around that time, Krantz learned that Atomic had moved to Miami and eventually connected with the venture studio to build their first web3 startup.
“The first idea that came to mind: What can we do to make self custody easier? My friend just lost his Bored Ape that’s worth half a million dollars. There’s got to be a way to fix this.”
That way? It’s called Fire, a startup that this month raised $3.5 million in funding from Atomic. “We came up with a tool that basically shows what you’re about to sign before you sign it in a human readable format.”
The platform, which has been live for about five months, is already used by over 60,000 wallets. Krantz said that this funding will help expand the currently five-person team, with a focus on product and engineering talent.
Originally, most of Fire’s users were crypto whales (people with large crypto holdings). But now, Krantz signaled that the company attracts a much broader clientele that includes newer crypto users.
Krantz attributes Fire’s rapid growth to product-market fit. “Our use case is just so clear and the pain point is so acute that when users see the product, they realize they need it and want to tell their friends about it.”
“Our mission at Fire is to help onboard the next billion users in web3 by making transactions easier for users and dapp developers alike,” Jordan Kong, Principal at Atomic, shared in a blog post. “To date, the vast majority of users have not been able to self-custody in a secure and easy way, much less interact safely with dapps across the crypto ecosystem. We’re starting with security, but our work has just begun.”
Next up for fire: launching a wallet product by the end of the year, Krantz said. “We’ve built up a brand, we’ve built up some trust, we’ve built up a user base – and now we’re working on building out a wallet, which is a much bigger market than this original kind of tool that we’ve built.”
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