India-based crypto and digital banking startup Juno announced that it had successfully finished a Series A investment round, which brought in $18 million and was led by ParaFi Capital’s Growth Fund. The startup, which used to be called Onjuno, is a digital banking service that encourages its customers to use cryptocurrency in their regular financial transactions. Circle’s most popular product is the Juno card, which lets customers buy things with Circle’s stablecoin USDC.
Surojit Chatterjee, the Chief Product Officer of Coinbase, was there, as were Ryan Selkis from Messari, Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani from Polygon, Sriram Krishnan from a16z, Balaji Srinivasan, the former Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase, and Venu Palaparthi from FTX.
Juno says it plans to use the money it just got to expand its product line, as well as its business operations, staff, and tokenized loyalty program. The company said that only verified account holders would get the new Juno currency ($JCOIN), which is an ERC20 token. The customer loyalty program will be similar to how credit cards with rewards points work. The company says that the loyalty program will allow Juno users to get paid in cryptocurrency, spend bitcoin with their Juno debit card, and earn $JCOIN while using the service. As a reward for doing certain things on Juno, the loyalty program will give tokens to users who have done those things.
Juno’s CEO and co-founder, Varun Deshpande had the following to say, “We believe that these institutions are not crypto-friendly.We think these banks are not crypto-friendly. The aim of the loyalty program is to incentivize those already predisposed to using crypto to fundamentally replace their traditional banking stack.”
Juno’s platform has grown to include 75,000 checking accounts, and every month it handles $100 million in payments. This includes payments made both through USDC and with USDC.
