Announcing Our Investment in ZAR

We are excited to announce our investment in Zar, a platform transforming how people in emerging markets access and use dollars. Across Latin America, Asia, and Africa, demand for dollar-denominated payments is surging. Local currencies are volatile, inflation is persistent, and citizens are increasingly seeking alternatives that preserve their purchasing power. Yet for hundreds of millions of people, accessing the dollar system remains prohibitively expensive, slow, or simply unavailable.

Zar meets users where they are: physically, financially, and behaviorally, by letting them opt into the U.S. dollar system without needing to change their habits. The insight is simple but powerful. In nearly every country on earth, there is a trusted agent network already in place: corner stores, airtime top-up shops, remittance counters moving hundreds of billions of dollars in cash every year. Zar turns those physical touchpoints into access nodes for the digital dollar economy.

By leveraging existing agent networks, Zar users can easily gain access to digital dollars through a seamless mobile app. Meanwhile, agents can monetize an additional service alongside their existing digital products they offer daily. Under the hood, Zar is a decentralized protocol connecting three parties: consumers who want dollar access, agents who facilitate the exchange, and liquidity providers who backstop the system.

The on-the-ground traction speaks for itself. Zar has scaled from zero to $15 million in annualized volume in under three years. While they are anchored in Pakistan, where the need for dollar access is acute and the existing fintech infrastructure is nascent, the model is inherently global. From Argentina to the Philippines, the conditions are the same: cash is king, but trust in the local currency is gone.

We believe Zar can become a foundational access layer for the internet financial system: a bridge not just between fiat and crypto, but between the cash economy and the digital economy. It is the kind of company that does not ask users to change their behavior. Instead, it meets them where they are, with a product that feels familiar while running on infrastructure that is fundamentally better.

We are proud to partner with Brandon, Sebastian, and the Zar team on their vision to reduce the gap between the cash and internet-native economies. This is what we mean when we talk about backing founders who are building for the next era of money: products that are locally relevant, globally scalable, and financially inclusive by design.