Ryder co-founder and CEO Louise Ivan Valencia Payawal
Tim Draper, the founder of Draper Associates and an early investor in Tesla, Facebook, and Skype, has led a US$3.2 million seed funding round of Singapore-based consumer crypto hardware wallet startup Ryder.
Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Asymmetric’s Joe McCann, as well as Borderless Capital, Semantic, Smape, and VeryEarly, also joined.
Also Read: Blockchain boom: The Philippines’s rise in Southeast Asia’s crypto scene
Ryder was built by Filipino entrepreneur Louise Ivan Valencia Payawal (CEO), Marvin Janssen (CTO), and Julien Nerée (CPO). Its consumer crypto hardware wallet Ryder One is designed to prioritise ease of use and security. The wallet promises users crypto security in 60 seconds or less. The product features TapSafe recovery, a proprietary tap-based experience that eliminates the “single point of failure” previously inherent in traditional seed phrases.
“What the crypto industry needs more than anything right now is solutions that don’t require in-depth technical knowledge while maintaining high security standards. This is exactly what I saw in Ryder’s hardware wallet with its minute-or-under setup and offline design that keeps users’ holdings safe,” Draper claimed.
Ryder will use the newly acquired funds to strategically deploy to ramp production, scale the marketing and engineering teams, and further develop the wallet. The capital is also earmarked to enable the next large-scale marketing push and raise brand awareness globally.
Co-founder and CTO Marvin Janssen shared, “With Ryder One, we set out to make crypto feel natural and human and as easy as tapping your phone. By simplifying the overall experience and rethinking recovery, we’re opening the door for anyone, anywhere to truly and confidently own and use crypto.”
According to Payawal, Ryder aims to make crypto ownership more accessible, especially for his fellow countrymen. He previously accumulated experience at tech firms across Europe and the US, including a key role at Stacks, a prominent innovative contract platform built on Bitcoin, where he helped evolve the network to over 100,000 community members across more than 30 countries.
Also Read: US$2.36 trillion: Asia Pacific becomes crypto’s growth engine
His entrepreneurial track record also includes being the 2015 champion of Startup Weekend ASEAN.
The annual Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index for 2025 shows that Southeast Asia features prominently in the grassroots cryptocurrency activity. Within the top 20 countries for grassroots adoption, Vietnam ranks fourth globally, followed by Indonesia (7th), the Philippines (9th), and Thailand (17th). This strong showing is attributed to robust engagement from their populations across both centralised and decentralised crypto services.
As per the “Philippine Blockchain Report 2025″, the country is rapidly positioning itself as a significant player in the ASEAN blockchain landscape, propelled by a tech-savvy population, robust cryptocurrency adoption, and strong governmental support for emerging technologies.
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