Elph

Elph was a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2018 that built digital payments infrastructure on top of blockchain technology. Its stated focus was making digital payments easy, secure and scalable, with two product directions: developer tools for accepting cryptocurrency payments inside applications, and consumer-facing software for storing, managing and transacting cryptocurrency.

The company was small, with five recorded team members, and is categorized under payments, digital currency, fintech and web3/crypto. In March 2019 Brex, then positioning itself as the first corporate card for startups, acquired Elph; the entire five-person founding team joined Brex, where Brex's VP of Engineering Cosmin Nicolaescu cited their product, engineering and infrastructure experience as an accelerant to Brex's roadmap as it moved upmarket. Elph's domain, elph.com, now resolves to Brex's finance software platform site.

Founding story

Sources record Elph as founded in 2018 in San Francisco with five founding members: Ritik Malhotra (CEO), Tanooj Luthra (CTO), Vamsi Chitters, Sarat Ravi and Abhinav Lanka. Malhotra and Luthra had previously co-founded Y Combinator-backed Streem, which was acquired by Box in 2014; the wider team had worked at Coinbase, Google, Box and Yahoo.

Business model

Elph supplied software and infrastructure for cryptocurrency payments, serving developers integrating crypto payment acceptance into applications and end users storing and transacting cryptocurrency. Sources do not describe pricing or contracting terms.

Traction

Sources record a team of five and three undisclosed-amount seed rounds; no customer, revenue or usage metrics are reported. The company's principal recorded outcome was its acquisition by Brex.

Latest developments

Following the 2019 acquisition, Elph's founding team joined Brex, and elph.com now serves Brex's corporate finance platform content, including corporate cards, expense management, travel, bill pay, banking and treasury products.