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In each business, he’s tried to take the same approach: building financial technology to improve the lot of people living in emerging markets. Before Taptap Send, Fay founded GiveDirectly and Segovia. The startup is the third entrepreneurial outing for Michael Faye, a development economist who previously worked for the United Nations. On top of this, there is an economy of scale principle at play here: Having better rates will drive more users, which in turn might not mean better margins but a higher volume of transacting and more returns overall. It has built its whole tech stack from the ground up and says that this lets it pass on lower exchange rates to its customers, typically lower than others that might be serving the same markets.

The company’s business model works by way of charging no commission or any other fees for transfers, instead making a cut on foreign exchange. Taptap Send is among the startups that is trying to approach the promise of tech with this in mind, and with a view to bucking that trend. Of course, that doesn’t mean that other, less wealthy demographics don’t exist, or don’t also need new technology but building for them is usually less lucrative and more risky. or regions like Western Europe: There is a lot of money there, and specifically consumers and businesses with the kind of income that allows them to invest in new technologies and simply to do more. There is a reason that a lot of companies launch and build services in countries like the U.S.

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The Series A was co-led by Canaan Partners and Reid Hoffman, with other unnamed investors also participating.

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The 15 receiver countries include some of the poorest countries in the world that are the hardest to service, plus emerging markets with some of the poorest populations - DR Congo, Mali and Madagascar among them - while the eight originator countries include some of the most common places to which people from these countries emigrate - United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, France and Italy among them. Taptap Send, which provides a “free” mobile money transfer service from eight countries to 15 others, has raised $13.4 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its scope and the services that it provides to its customers. Today, a startup that has built a remittance platform that it believes is the most economically sympathetic and useful to the people who use those services the most is announcing some funding to continue growing. Remittances - specifically when people in developed countries send money to family or friends in emerging markets - continue to be a huge lever to help those in more challenging economies survive and improve their lot.

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