Company Name: Teya
Founder: Sriram Bhargav Karnati, Sumeet Bhatt, Vikas Choudhary
Established date: December 2022
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Amount of Bitcoin held by the Treasury: “That’s important.”
Number of employees: 7
Website: https://www.theya.us/
Public or private? private
Sriram Bhargav Karnati believes that the highest levels of security and ease of use are not mutually exclusive when it comes to managing Bitcoin.
So he and his co-founders Teya They built a multi-sig Bitcoin vault (a mechanism that requires multiple participants to sign a Bitcoin transaction) and allowed users to manage it conveniently from their mobile devices.
“Our mission is to make self-management easy for everyone,” Carnati said.
“If you look at trillion-dollar companies — the big tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook — they all have great products that regular people can use. But if you look at bitcoin, they don’t have a product that’s easy for anybody to use without being a security engineer or having technical expertise,” he added.
“(We) want to make it super easy to onboard people and super convenient to have long-term storage.”
Karnati’s background building consumer products for major companies like Google and Robinhood, combined with his deep understanding of Bitcoin, makes him the perfect fit for the job of bringing multi-sig Bitcoin vaults to the masses.
Silicon Valley star turns to Bitcoin
Growing up in Bombay, Karnati dreamed of working in Silicon Valley.
He got that opportunity when he started working at Google in 2014 and has contributed to a number of the company’s products.
“At Google, I didn’t just work on one team,” Carnati recalls.
“We touched almost every product that you use, Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Ads, everything,” he added.
“The biggest lessons we learned from that were: ‘How do you build a system from scratch and scale it to billions of users?’ and ‘How do people think about using the product?'”
By 2021, Carnati had joined Robinhood, another prominent Bay Area-based tech company.
At Robinhood, Karnati learned about the intersection of money, finance and technology, and paid close attention to what the company was doing right when it came to user experience.
“When I worked at Robinhood, one of the biggest lessons I learned was: how do you take a complex financial product and make it super simple?”[We were]basically providing access to participate in the financial industry to everyone.”
Carnati is now applying the lessons he learned in Silicon Valley to self-custody Bitcoin.
He understands that if bitcoin is to scale as originally intended — with users holding their own bitcoins in self-custody — non-custodial bitcoin wallets and vaults need to become easier to use.
So, we introduce Theya, a dynamic and secure solution for self-custody of Bitcoin.
How Theya works
Theya’s vault employs a 2/3 multisig setup, meaning that to execute a transaction, two of the three private key holders must sign a send of Bitcoin from the vault. Theya holds one of the keys, and the user holds the other two.
What makes Theya unique is that it is the first multi-sig solution that does not require the use of hardware wallets, which Karnati believes can be intimidating for new Bitcoin users.
“Mobile multisig is for people who don’t have a hardware wallet but want self-custody with more than a single sig[device],” Carnati explained.
“You and your spouse can create a family wallet. That kind of product didn’t exist before Theya,” he added.
“[They]can start with multisig and then slowly upgrade to a hardware wallet and create a cold storage[setup]as they accumulate more and more bitcoin.”
Theya charges $199 per year for this service.
That said, Karnati and the Theya team are aware that no one will be opting for a multisig setup anytime soon, especially given the higher price tag.
In keeping with Theya’s mission to provide self-custody to as many people as possible, Karnati explained that Theya also offers a free non-custodial wallet option.
“Single-sig mobile wallets are free,” he says. “You can create as many as you like.”
Karnati added that the free single-signature service will also be compatible with hardware wallets: For example, the Theya app can be used to interface with supported hardware wallets, including Ledger, Trezor, ColdCard and Foundation devices.
But who would invest in a company that gives away part of its product for free to further its mission?
One of the most prominent venture capital (VC) firms in the broader cryptocurrency and technology space is Y Combinator.
Why Y Combinator?
To launch Theya, Karnati and her co-founders Y Combinatoris known for helping financially accelerate startups in the broader cryptocurrency space, rather than just bitcoin startups (often those that issue their own cryptocurrency tokens).
So, what made Y Combinator interested in Theya?
“Y Combinator doesn’t invest on ideas,” Carnati says, “they invest on the pedigree of the founders.”
Considering that Theya’s other two founders, Smeet Bhatt and Vikas Choudary, also have impressive backgrounds and extensive experience in technology, logistics and finance, it’s not hard to see why Y Combinator was interested.
But it wasn’t just the background of Theya’s founders that Y Combinator recognized.
“They love our mission too,” Carnati said.
“There’s a clear space that we can build in. Everybody wants to make a quick buck. Everybody wants to make tokens and stuff. And they thought, ‘They’re doing something different and they’re filling a void where there aren’t any big products,'” he added.
Karnati’s belief in Bitcoin
Given that Carnati has the skills as a developer to work for any technology company, one might ask why the focus on Bitcoin.
“I am Satoshi’s White Paper “I read it in 2014 and it made some sense to me,” Carnati recalls. “Then Andreas Mastering Bitcoin To get a better understanding of how it works.”
But it’s not just his theoretical understanding of Bitcoin that has made him a believer in it.
“Then I bought some bitcoin and did some transactions on-chain,” he said.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Wow, this is real.’ I was able to move my own money without permission. It was clear that this was the future of money,” he added.
Karnati contrasted his experience trading bitcoin with sending international remittances to India from South Korea, where he lived, while working at Samsung, where he experienced one of bitcoin’s main value propositions: cheap and fast money transfers.
“It required a lot of KYC and verification and was very slow,” Karnati said of the process of sending money through traditional financial systems. “It could fail and was very costly – there was a 1.5% fee on top of foreign exchange fees.”
After this experience, Karnati learned about and experimented with other blockchains, but returned to Bitcoin after gaining a deeper understanding of its other main property: its ability to store value.
“I realized the most important thing is that it’s a store of value,” Carnati said of what distinguishes Bitcoin from other digital assets.
This inspired us to develop a product that makes storing private keys for stores of value easier and more secure.
What’s next for Theya?
In addition to providing users with the best multisig vault experience, Karnati and the team at Theya have additional goals for the app.
“Payments is definitely an area where we want to grow,” Carnati said. “We want to make it easier for merchants to accept payments and for someone to offer a subscription service.”
But he, lightning That’s not what’s next for Teya.
Karnati and his team are currently focused on introducing an exchange into the app so that users can buy bitcoin within the app and send it directly to cold storage. He was motivated to add such a feature in part because he saw shortcomings in other bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges in the space, including Robinhood, where he previously worked.
“Some of our users have accounts with Coinbase and Robinhood,” Carnati explained.
“(These platforms) have restrictions on withdrawals and are a hassle (for users). With what we’re building, you can buy directly into your self-managed vault,” he added, proving that convenience and the highest levels of security can coexist in one app.
