Newtown Partners, a VC firm founded by Llew Claasen and Vinny Lingham, has made an equity investment in blockchain startup Wala.

Founded in 2015, Wala is a blockchain-powered financial services platform for the unbanked and underbanked. The investment will enable it to deliver on the promise of zero-fee financial services for the 3.5bn consumers who are currently excluded from the formal financial system.

“Wala’s blockchain-enabled platform will enable greater access to zero fee financial services to billions of consumers in emerging markets and enable everyone to become economically active, no matter where in the world they are. These are the kinds of big problems being addressed by bold innovations that we like to back” explained Llew Claasen, managing partner of Newtown Partners.

Wala works with specialist providers in each market it is operational in, including banks, to offer a full suite of financial services, including transactional banking, remittances, loans, and insurance. Partners benefit from the reach and low cost access to previously unserviceable customers enabled by the Wala platform.

“Through the use of blockchain technology and tokenization, we have developed a platform that makes it possible to serve the financially excluded economically at scale. Our community's guidance has ensured that the Wala Financial Platform has been built by the people for the people,” Wala founder and CEO Tricia Martinez said. “We are thrilled to be working with Newtown Partners. The depth and breadth of their expertise as both entrepreneurs and investors in technology, combined with their commitment to creating globally successful startups will be key to the future success of Wala. We are excited about taking the next steps in our journey with Llew & Vinny.”

Wala has grown its financial services community to 1 million consumers in over 100 countries. The roll out of the Wala platform is initially planned for emerging markets in Africa, following the footprint of local banking services partners, before expanding globally.

Wala will be the launch partner for a new financial services utility token, Dala, which will be sold and issued in a crowdfunding token sale this October. Dala will support the operationalization and further development of scalable, blockchain-enabled financial platforms for developing markets around a common unit of account and microeconomic incentive structure to create strong network effects.

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