A gap in the market
Zach Walsh, co-founder and CEO of HIFI, likes to joke that when you’re growing up, no one says that they want to go into FinTech: “It just happens to you.” In Zach’s case it happened in his 20s, when he was hustling for a career in New York City. Jobs at Sony and Uber led him to meet the team at a buy-now pay-later company called Quadpay, which he helped scale before it was sold to a larger player on the ASX. All his work during this time, he says, was focused on “money movement and payments through some lens.” He soon realised there was a gap in the market – and a space to build something of his own.
At the time, Zach had seen a surge in interest from corporates trying to get into Web3 and Crypto and the main use case was payments. But making payment in crypto across most products was exceptionally clunky. “We realised the infrastructure just didn’t exist,” he says. Teaming up with co-founder and COO Mohamed Afifi – one of the first people he connected with after moving to NYC – they began to build fast, creating the infrastructure and API needed to make things click.
From WeWork to Madison Square Park
in 2022, he founded HIFI (then HIFI Bridge), a next-generation payments platform that leverages blockchain technology and stablecoins to enable money to be moved seamlessly – and instantly – around the world. Since then, the NYC-based start up has grown into a team of 25 people (and is about to double headcount); has moved from a WeWork unit into a 6,000 sq ft office in Madison Square Park; and has a transaction volume in the billions.
"He is one of the most maniac workers I’ve seen, I’m going to bet on him."
“I’m glad to see the narrative catching up to the opportunity for this sort of tech,” says Zach, pointing to the GENIUS act, which was just passed in the US and established a regulatory framework for stablecoins, as well as a number of large mergers and acquisitions that have acted as a “black swan event” for the company. “There was just us and one other company [Bridge] building this thesis for the past two years,” says Zach. “And they immediately got acquired by Stripe for a little over a billion – the largest acquisition in crypto history – which just opened the floodgates to market interest.”
First in, last to leave
HIFI is also one of the fastest growing portfolio companies in Antler, which Zach joined in Spring 2023. At the time, Zach was deep in the process of building the HIFI API. During Antler he was first in each day and last to leave and just sat in a back corner head down. “I think I was pretty off-putting to everyone there”, he says. “Like I’m going to build this company with or without you.” That mentality caught the attention of Jeff Becker, Antler partner in New York. When the company went through its first investment round it didn’t get the votes. “But Jeff was like, no, he is one of the most maniac workers I’ve seen, I’m going to just bet on him.”
"We're just trying to build the best infrastructure and the best platform."
For Zach, that was the launchpad to where he is today. “Getting your first check anywhere in venture capital is incredibly difficult,” he says. “And so the connections you can make through the program…it’s like a validation credit, which is incredibly valuable. We wouldn't have been able to get all those then subsequent meetings and raise our $8 million afterwards, really, without any of that.”
“Early-internet” growth numbers
And with the market ripe,HIFI is set to continue to grow at pace. Right now, stablecoins have an estimated $250bn market cap – over the course of the next year it will hit between $2-3 trillion. “You could think of it as like early internet-based growth numbers,” says Zach. “And even within this small period of this market cap, we already have the most profitable company in human history that's getting built out of it.”
The possibility that HiFi could follow suit is tantalising – and the offers are already coming in – but for now Zach is focused on growing the company. “M&A interest is very exciting to us and we appreciate it, but we think there's an incredible opportunity right now,” he says. “So we're just trying to build the best infrastructure and the best platform to power the most businesses globally…we'll continue to take it day by day.”
