Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Hello Clever.
Hello Clever is building a global payments layer that lets merchants accept local payment methods across geographies through a single integration. We believe the rise of real-time payment networks (RTPs) creates a massive opportunity for this business that incumbents are not positioned to capitalize on.
While they don’t get nearly as much spotlight as stablecoins, RTPs are exploding in popularity. The benefits are clear — RTPs enable online transactions like credit cards but, unlike cards, settle instantly and cost merchants only a few cents rather than a 2-3% interchange fee. Adoption is particularly strong in emerging markets: UPI launched in India in 2016, DuitNow in Malaysia in 2018, Pix in Brazil in 2020, VietQR in Vietnam in 2021, to name a few. Because central banks in these countries require domestic banks to connect to them and the cost to use them is near zero, they are seeing serious adoption. For example, Brazil’s Pix in 2023 handled more transactions than credit and debit cards combined, and last year it overtook credit cards as the most used method for online purchases in the country.1 In many emerging markets, RTPs took consumers straight from cash to digital payments, skipping cards entirely.
While RTPs represent a step-function improvement for payments in many places in the world, the catch is that they are national. A merchant in Australia cannot accept VietQR from a customer in Vietnam or DuitNow from a customer in Malaysia because their banking systems do not interoperate. In a world of global payments, this creates a fragmentation problem: for online purchases, the rails that connect one country’s banking system to another’s are generally the card networks, which sit at the bottleneck and charge accordingly — a classic hourglass market. Existing payment giants are disincentivized to solve this because they are not neutral towards payment methods. They make the majority of their revenue by charging bips on top of interchange, so the merchant is left accepting cards at high fees or losing customers who don’t have them.2 Where incumbents do support RTPs, they’re priced like a card so it doesn’t cannibalize the business they’ve built on interchange.3
These dynamics have created a greenfield opportunity for Hello Clever to counter-position by offering a neutral layer that connects RTPs (and other payment channels) and selects the best option for merchants based on conversion, cost, speed, risk ,and settlement in as many markets across the globe as possible (currently in 25 markets!). This means the Australian merchant can now receive VietQR from the Vietnamese customer or DuitNow from the Malaysian customer. And given the savings versus cards, the merchant can pass some of that savings back to its customers as loyalty rewards directly on the platform. For the 80% of adults in developing economies who do not own credit cards,4 stringing together these rails enables autonomy, allowing them to participate in the global digital economy regardless of where they’re from.
This would already be a very large business, but the grand vision is even more exciting. After having piggybacked on RTPs to build a neutral layer sitting between merchants and every payment rail, checkout can become a live market rather than a static menu. Each time a customer arrives, every funding source available to them — their bank via a local RTP, a card issuer, a wallet, a BNPL provider — will compete for the transaction by offering the customer the best terms that routes to the best payment option. For the first time, the rails would compete for the customer, rather than the customer being stuck with whatever rail the merchant’s processor prefers.
Co-founders Caroline Tran, CEO, and Gavin Nguyen, CTO, took Hello Clever from an idea to a profitable business with tens of millions in annualized revenue and 1,000+ merchants in less than five years and built and scaled a 100+-person team across six countries, all on less than $6 million in outside capital. This traction was enough to convince Justin Grooms to join them as president this July. Justin was the general manager of global sales at Bolt, inking some of the firm’s largest deals with merchants as the company grew to an $11B valuation, eventually taking over as president and CEO. We believe this team is just getting started on their path to redefine how we think of payments, and we could not be more excited to back them.
1. Per Reuters, citing central bank data: Pix passed credit and debit cards combined by transaction count in 2023, and took 42% of Brazilian online purchases in 2025 versus 41% for credit cards.
2. Adyen, which reports its numbers publicly, illustrates how much rides on its card take rate: settlement and processing fees alone were 82% of its 2025 revenue (net of the interchange and scheme fees that are passed on to banks). Payment products are set up accordingly, with cards enabled by default for both Adyen and Stripe, and limited RTP options like Pix and UPI left for the merchant to switch on or request access to.
3. For example, Stripe charges 2% on Pix and UPI, which mirrors card economics on rails that cost a fraction of what card networks charge. Hello Clever charges 0.4% + 70 cents for real-time bank payments.
4. From the World Bank’s 2025 Global Findex survey, which surveyed adults in 141 economies: 19.8% of adults in developing economies own a credit card, and 5.0% in lower-middle-income economies (low-income economies are at 1.8%). The World Bank sorts countries by income each July; the lower-middle group runs from $1,176 to $4,635 of national income per person and covers India, Indonesia,Vietnam, the Philippines, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt. Data at worldbank.org/en/publication/globalfindex/download-data.