SMB neobank Nilos merges crypto and fiat for businesses

Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile operations across multiple accounts.

The startup raised a $5.2 million funding round back in April. Viola Ventures and Fabric Ventures led the round, with Mensch Capital Partners also participating. Several business angels also contributed to this round, such as Yuval Tal, Sebastien Borget, Emmanuel Schalit, Benjamin Seror, Didier Valet, Guillaume Houzé, Phillipe Suchet and Valentine Baudoin.

“We started with a simple finding. There are thousands of companies that manage crypto assets, but there are even more companies that want to hold crypto assets — but they find it too complex,” co-founder and CMO Eytan Messika told me.

And it’s true that there are a lot of implications when you start fiddling with cryptocurrencies. There are some taxation difficulties and some compliancy requirements. Handling fraud also becomes a lot more complex. Big companies can easily add crypto assets to their cash balance because they have enough resources — but it’s still a hassle for small companies.

Essentially, Nilos wants to lower the barrier to entry. If you are getting started, you can create a custodial crypto wallet with Nilos directly. This way, clients don’t have to store and manage digital assets directly.

In the future, customers will also be able to connect their own wallets directly. For instance, you will be able to use Gnosis Safe, a popular non-custodial option for companies holding crypto assets. Similarly, you’ll soon be able to connect your traditional business bank accounts in the interface.

After that, what you get is a nice dashboard that will help you sort through all your transactions. You can filter, categorize and label automatically both incoming and outgoing transactions. You can also reconcile payments from Nilos directly.

Nilos also helps you manage your crypto transactions as you can orchestrate crypto-to-crypto payments as well as crypto-to-fiat payments. You can use that feature to pay employees and suppliers, rebalance your treasury between crypto and fiat assets.

The startup currently takes a fees on crypto-to-fiat transactions, but the company plans to move to a more traditional software-as-a-service subscription model as it’s more transparent for the end users. Some of the first clients are AnotherBlock, Rocket3, Metafight and Rarecubes.

Right now, Nilos is registered under the supervision of the Financial Crime Investigation Service (FCIS) in Lithuania, but the company already plans to apply to become a virtual asset service provider in France under the PSAN scheme.

In other words, it’s still early days for Nilos. But it’s clear that crypto companies mostly focus on big enterprise customers and retail investors. Small companies remain and underserved market and Nilos plans to take advantage of that.