Zebec
Backing the streaming-payments thesis at seed
Table of Contents
Sam Thapaliya was 24 when Zebec closed its first round in November 2021. He grew up in Bharatpur, Nepal, didn't see a bank until he was 13, and spent his teens building ERP software for local businesses. By 2017 he was studying management information systems at Menlo College in the Bay Area, where he wrote the paper that became Zebec's thesis. Money should stream the way data does, continuously, not arrive in batched payroll runs every fortnight.
By 2021 he had a Solana protocol that proved the concept, and an idea about which partners could help him scale it. We came in on that first round.
How we got involved
The role was narrow and specific. Advisory. We provided access to investors to help secure Zebec's first round. Republic Capital, Shima Capital, and Breyer Capital co-led the $6M seed in November 2021, with Liberty City Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Launchpad VC, Infinity Ventures Crypto, and others alongside. The relationship has been quieter since, by design. Zebec's product, brand, and engineering belong to Sam's team. We bet on the founder and the thesis.
The story so far
The seed kicked off a five-year run that took Zebec from streaming-payments protocol to multi-product fintech. The original ZBC token launched on Solana in 2022. Real-time stablecoin payroll (Zebec Pay) and a Visa-program crypto card (Zebec Card) shipped the same year. The consumer brand was in market by March 2023. Nautilus Chain, Zebec's modular L3 staging chain, went mainnet in August 2023. By December 2023 the Instant Card was live in 138 countries on both Visa and Mastercard rails.
After acquiring PayBridge in 2023, a payroll and HCM platform doing $300M in annual payroll volume, Zebec ran its 2024 token migration from ZBC to ZBCN at a 1:10 ratio and added School Payroll Services to the payroll portfolio. In 2025 it acquired UK fintech Science Card (50,000+ users across 10 universities), joined the Circle Alliance Program with USDC as default stablecoin, and partnered with Lattice Finance to launch a Mastercard debit card on Canton Network.
Zebec rebranded from "Zebec Protocol" to "Zebec Network" during the migration, becoming part streaming-payments protocol, part web3 banking front-end, part acquisition-built payroll infrastructure.
Scale
What this set up
Five years on from the seed we helped assemble, Zebec is one of the best-known streaming-payments protocols to come out of Solana, with a full fintech stack wrapped around it. Real-time stablecoin payroll. A Visa-and-Mastercard card live in 138 countries. An L3 chain. Circle Alliance membership with USDC as default stablecoin. Four fintech acquisitions. The original $6M round was the smallest Zebec has ever raised, and a small introduction at the right moment was all it took to put us in the cap table.
Links
Channels
- Site: zebec.io
- Docs: docs.zebec.io
- Blog: zebec.io/blog
- Medium: medium.com/zebec-protocol
- X/Twitter: @Zebec_HQ
- YouTube: @Zebec_HQ
- Discord: discord.gg/fJM9cHuvvB
- Telegram: t.me/zebecprotocol
- Instagram: @zebec_hq
Media
- Founder Q&A with Sam Thapaliya — Circle
- Inside Track with Sam Thapaliya, Founder of Zebec Protocol
- The Importance of Scaling: A Talk with Sam Thapaliya
- Beluga Spotlight: Sam Thapaliya, Founder of Zebec