Founder Story: Rubén Galindo Steckel from Airtm

Airtm develops financial infrastructure that supports the digital economy in developing countries.

Airtm is a Circle Ventures portfolio company.

How did you and your founders come together to start Airtm?

Three of us were working at a Bitcoin startup in San Francisco, Uphold, selling their services to enterprise customers. We were enamored by blockchain’s potential to give people in distressed economies access to financial freedom. We decided to build Airtm, a crypto dollar wallet + OTC crypto dollar marketplace, as the ultimate tool against restrictive capital controls.

What inspired you to create Airtm and what problem does it solve?

In the more than five years of building a tool to give everyone unrestricted access to USD, one of the main things we learned was that financial freedom, namely, the freedom to choose the denomination of your savings, was a half solution to a huge problem. The huge problem is that millions of people live in countries with low wages and they are constrained by their local economy.

What good is giving people restriction-less access to USD savings if they have no disposable income to save at the end of the month? That's why Airtm shifted its focus to digital entrepreneurship and the ability that earning money online has to make people financially independent, regardless of economic constraints in their home country.

Can you expand on some use cases for Airtm that you're seeing in LATAM?

The only use case we care about is Digital Entrepreneurship, that is, people who make a living by working online. There is a wide spectrum of digital entrepreneurs. For example, consider freelancers, content creators, gamers, retail investors, or even members of the online gig economy. We embrace this diverse economy fully by helping them get paid and convert funds into their local currency quickly and at low cost.

We care about fostering developing economies, which requires helping digital entrepreneurs' places of online work deliver payments to them.  We do so by offering mass cross-border payment tools for large enterprises and are proud to count Scale AI, Youtube, Twitch, Fiverr, Patreon, etc. as some of our customers.

What does Airtm’s roadmap look like over the next year?

At the end of 2023, Airtm's retail wallet will be fully native on both IOS and Android. It will also include three new products (the ability to do local sends to people outside of the Airtm network, a simple virtual currency to local currency exchange, and a bonus feature that we have not announced yet). Our retail wallet will also improve, with the target of becoming a full self-custody wallet on Stellar. 

On the enterprise side, we expect our mass cross-border payment services to be at product parity with Paypal's.

Can you tell us about some of the challenges you've endured as a founder in web3?

Building in Web3 has been especially challenging in our highly regulated financial service industry. For a long time, regulators made it difficult for Airtm to access the broader economy. However, modern financial service providers like Circle have grown, making it easier for Airtm and millions around the world to provide value for clients and benefit from the internet economy. 

What’s your top piece of advice for founders in this industry?

Your startup idea lives in your head, it will only die if you decide to stop pushing. So don't stop pushing. Time is the only blocker to imminent success. Be patient, keep pushing, and be thankful.