Poko

Alumni Q&A

How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)

Geoffrey See was CSO and a founding team member of a $2.4B protocol in 2018-2019, led technical work on Singapore's central bank cross-border blockchain settlement experiment, and served on World Economic Forum taskforces for cross-border digital payments. Van Tran ran growth and strategy for Netflix across Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan, covering over $1B in annual revenue, and Daniel Le worked as a payments engineer at a YC unicorn before becoming CTO of a play-to-earn game he scaled to 2M users and a team of 100+ in one year. The three met in Vietnam over a shared interest in cross-border payments in gaming and entertainment and have worked together for over two years.

What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?

After YC demo day, the company pivoted from building DAO tooling to payment infrastructure for web3, having identified friction in payments as a barrier for products trying to reach wider audiences. It navigated the 2022 industry turmoil (Terra, FTX, Silvergate, Signature, Celsius) without direct financial impact.

What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?

The founders are addressing cross-border payments on blockchain rails, a multi-trillion dollar market with high take rates, on the view that crypto wallets will become financial infrastructure for a global user base.