We are proud to announce our investment in Jiko’s Series B round, led by Red River West, and to bring Jiko into the Airbus Ventures family as our newest portfolio company. We are excited to support Jiko in building a corporate money storage solution – particularly as companies of all sizes look to make cash work harder to combat inflation.
Jiko is a revolutionary financial network to store and move money. Its Jiko Money Storage solution, which launched today, enables companies of all tiers – from multinational corporates to startups – to store money in spendable T-bills. Jiko’s network, which operates more cost efficiently than other fintechs on the market due to its technology stack, bank charter and status as a broker-dealer, also enables companies to conduct banking and financial activities in a manner that is simple, effective, and secure. The Jiko team is led by an exceptional CEO and Co-Founder Stephane Lintner, whom we have known in an entrepreneurial capacity for years. Stephane has the perfect fit in background, coming from nearly a decade at Goldman Sachs leading strategies across multiple asset classes, and even has a PhD in applied and computational mathematics from Caltech. He is also a trained physicist and has spent time leading a company pursuing nuclear fusion-based propulsion in space. At Jiko, Stephane has built an impressive leadership team with deep experience at organizations including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Acorns, and Snap, Inc. With Jiko, all client balances are automatically invested in T-Bills, which can be liquidated on-demand to fund transactions and can earn higher net returns than conventional money market funds when held – a timely innovation, as organizations globally work to combat inflation. Importantly, all T-Bills on the platform are held in clients’ names and are entirely separate from Jiko’s liabilities. As such, clients still retain ownership of their deposit assets, even if Jiko ceases to exist. Many of today’s financial systems for money storage and payments can be expensive and slow, particularly in the U.S. and for cross-border transactions. Traditional money market funds, which maximize liquidity at the cost of low or even negative yields, can have layers of embedded fees and also pose the additional risk of redemption gates. If triggered, customers would not be able to redeem their MMF shares at all, or only certain amounts against cash until the gate is removed. Thus, an asset of supposedly highest liquidity could turn into an illiquid asset overnight. Ultimately, the movement of large sums of money is typically executed by a convoluted system of correspondent banks that make money on fees charged to facilitate these transactions, which accumulate quickly and create friction in the payments ecosystem. Transaction times are also typically long and potentially insecure, as with the ACH (Automated Clearing House) system in the U.S., which can take up to 3 business days and is susceptible to fraud. Jiko’s network simplifies this architecture while offering more protection for customer assets. For payments, the Jiko platform at scale represents a centralized money storage service where all transactions occur within a single entity. A transfer of money between two parties within the Jiko network simply involves changing account ledgers. As such, latency for on-network transactions would be minimal, at just 1 millisecond. For external transactions involving outgoing card payments, Jiko’s automated T-Bill trading desk kicks in – it takes 400 milliseconds for client-owned T-Bills to be sold and card payments funded and cleared under normal conditions. Additionally, Jiko‘s APIs allow partners to embed account functionality into their own offering for the benefit and for the use of their customers. We are excited to support Jiko in building a corporate money storage solution – particularly as companies of all sizes look to make cash work harder to combat inflation. Photo Source: JikoBy Claas Kohl and Tony Zhu