Seva Money raises $5M seed to serve the receiving end of remittances with stablecoin-ready wallets

Seva Money (London) has raised a $5 million (€4.5M) seed round co-led by Blockwall and Revent, with Seedcamp, Stride.VC, and Ada Ventures — all pre-seed backers — reinvesting. Angel participation includes Husayn Kassai (Onfido founder), Benjamin Fernandes (Nala founder), and Michael Kent (co-founder of Tandem Bank and Azimo). The company was founded by Ritu Soni, who previously held senior roles at WorldRemit, Paysafe, Skrill, and Lebara Money, bringing extensive operational experience from the corridors the company is now targeting.

The receiving side of the remittance market

The global remittance market moves over $850 billion a year. The competitive energy over the past decade has focused on the sender: cutting fees, accelerating settlement, adding mobile convenience for diaspora communities in the UK, US, or Europe. The receiver — typically in India, Mexico, the Philippines, or Sub-Saharan Africa — has largely been treated as a destination rather than a customer.

Seva Money's model reframes that endpoint. The company provides white-label wallets and payment cards to remittance recipients through partnerships with money transfer operators (MTOs). Rather than building another consumer remittance app that competes with WorldRemit or Wise, Seva integrates into the existing sender infrastructure and captures the moment of receipt: a named wallet and a card that the recipient controls, denominated in either local currency or stablecoins.

Stablecoins and the corridor opportunity

The stablecoin capability is not cosmetic. In markets where local currency depreciation is a live concern — Nigeria's naira, Kenya's shilling — a dollar-pegged wallet attached to a physical card changes the product's utility significantly. Seva is live in India and Mexico today, with plans to expand to the Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ghana over the next 12 months. The India and Mexico corridors are among the highest-volume globally; the Sub-Saharan expansion will be where stablecoin functionality is tested in earnest.

Blockwall, one of the co-leads, is a crypto-native investor; its presence alongside Revent (a Berlin-based impact investor with deep fintech exposure) suggests Seva is deliberately bridging traditional remittance infrastructure and emerging digital-currency rails, rather than betting exclusively on either.

Why it matters

Remittance infrastructure has spent two decades optimising the sending side. Seva Money's premise is that the receiving endpoint is the under-monetised asset. By integrating with MTO pipelines rather than competing with them, the company positions itself as the financial infrastructure layer for a population that moves money internationally but shops, saves, and borrows locally. The 18-month test is whether MTO adoption converts a clever product into a distribution business — without that partnership pipeline, the wallet has no inbound flow.