How Nansen Built a Leading Blockchain Platform, Supercharged By Aspire’s Multi-Currency Accounts

The Company: Blockchain analytics platform who aims to create the future of finance

Founded in 2020 by Alex Svanevik, Lars Bakke Krogvig and Evgeny Medvedev, the Nansen team are pioneers of the Web3 space with the aim to deliver more transparency about the wallets that are transacting on-chain. Their blockchain analytics platform analyses over 130 million wallet labels across blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Avalanche, Fantom and many more. This helps crypto-native investors, operators and funds discover emerging opportunities, perform due diligence and defend their portfolios with real-time notifications.

The Challenges: What pain points were Nansen looking to solve?

#1 Conventional bank accounts charged high fees for multi-currency capabilities

Once a team of 50 employees, Nansen’s headcount now stands at over 150 and is looking to expand even more. As a remote-first company, Nansen’s employees hail from all over the world, such as Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Germany, and the United States. To facilitate international payments for their global team, they sought a multi-currency bank account. However they found that conventional corporate accounts were not built with startups in mind一in fact, the fees charged for each international payment did not seem sustainable in the long run. This was one of the turning points for Nansen.

#2 Corporate card issuance was too limited

The Nansen team quickly found another sore point with conventional corporate banking一it’s restrictions on issuing multiple cards. As they continued to scale rapidly, Nansen needed to delegate spending to their remote employees. One of the ways was to provide them with their own corporate card. After all, having their own card will allow them to make fast purchases should they need to, such as paying for SaaS subscriptions and digital ads. However, they would need to pay for additional fees and go through multiple rounds of paperwork to be able to get multiple cards. The drawn-out and painstaking process was an excruciating experience that they wished to avoid.

#3 Lack of opportunities to generate cost savings

For most startups, managing cash flow effectively means ensuring each dollar spent goes into necessary expenses that furthers its growth. The same goes for Nansen. While that may be the case, they found that their conventional corporate card offers zero rewards when it comes to making SaaS subscription payments. SaaS was one of their largest and most important expense categories. Multiple teams across analytics, product and marketing rely on subscriptions to keep their day-to-day operations running smoothly. However, the card they used did not reward them for these expenses一leading to a missed opportunity to acquire cost savings for the company.