31 July 2024
Company Name: Theya
Founders: Sriram Bhargav Karnati, Smeet Bhatt and Vikas Choudhary
Date Founded: December 2022
Location of Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: “It’s significant.”
Number of Employees: 7
Website: https://www.theya.us/
Public or Private? Private
Sriram Bhargav Karnati believes that top-notch security and usability are not mutually exclusive when it comes to managing your bitcoin.
So, he and his co-founders at Theya have built a multsig bitcoin vault — a mechanism that requires multiple participants to sign off on a Bitcoin transaction — that users can conveniently manage from their mobile devices.
“Our mission is to make self-custody easy for everybody,” said Karnati.
“If you look at all the $1 trillion companies — all the big tech companies: Apple, Google, Facebook — they all have brilliant products that everyday people can use. But if you look at Bitcoin, you don’t have a product that’s super easy for everybody to use without having to become a security engineer or have technical expertise,” he added.
“[We] want to really make it super simple to onboard people and make long-term storage super convenient.”
Combining Karnati’s background in building consumer products for major companies like Google and Robinhood with his deep understanding of Bitcoin, it seems there’s perhaps no better person for the job of bringing multisig Bitcoin vaults to the masses.
A Silicon Valley All-Star Shifts To Bitcoin
Growing up in Bombay, Karnati dreamed of working in Silicon Valley.
He got the opportunity in 2014 when he began working at Google, where he contributed to a number of the company’s products.
“At Google, I didn’t work on just one team,” recounted Karnati.
“I touched almost all products that you use: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Ads — everything,” he added.
“My biggest lesson from that was ‘How do you build the system from the ground up and scale it to billions of users?’ And also ‘How do people think about using a product?’”
By 2021, Karnati found himself at another prominent Bay Area-based tech company, Robinhood.
At Robinhood, Karnati learned about the intersection of money, finance and technology, paying close attention to what the company got right when it came to user experience.
“When I worked at Robinhood, one of my biggest lessons was ‘How do you take complex financial instruments and make them super simple?’” explained Karnati. “[We were] basically giving access to everybody to join finance.”
Karnati has taken these lessons he learned in Silicon Valley and is now applying them to Bitcoin self-custody.
He knows that if Bitcoin is going to scale the way it was intended to — with users holding bitcoin in self-custody — then it has to become easier to use a non-custodial bitcoin wallet or vault.
Enter Theya — dynamic and secure solution to bitcoin self-custody.
How Theya Works
Theya’s vaults employ a 2-of-3 multsig setup, which means that two of the three private key holders have to sign off on sending bitcoin from the vault for the transaction to occur. Theya holds one of the keys while the user(s) hold the other two.
What’s unique about Theya is that its first multisig solution that doesn’t require the use of a hardware wallet — devices that Karnati believes are intimidating to newer bitcoin users.
“Mobile multisig is for people who don’t have a hardware wallet, but still want to do self-custody with more than a single-sig [device],” explained Karnati.
“You can create a family wallet with you and your spouse. That type of product didn’t exist before Theya,” he added.
“[They can] get started with multisig, and, as they accumulate more and more bitcoin, they can slowly upgrade to a hardware wallet and create a cold storage [setup].”
For this service, Theya charges an annual fee of $199.
That said, Karnati and the team at Theya are aware that not everyone is going to opt for a multisig setup right away, especially one that comes with a price tag attached.
Given Theya’s mission to onboard as many people to self-custody as possible, Karnati explained that Theya provides a free non-custodial wallet option, as well.
“The single-sig mobile wallet is free,” he said, “and you can create as many wallets as you want.”
Karnati added that the free single-sig offering is also compatible with hardware wallets. For example, you can use the Theya app as an interface for any of the hardware wallets it supports — including Ledger, Trezor, ColdCard and Foundation devices.
But who would invest in a company that gives part of its product away for free in efforts to fulfill its mission?
One of the most prominent venture capital (VC) firms in the broader crypto and tech space — Y Combinator — that’s who.
Why Y Combinator?
To get Theya off the ground, Karnati and his co-founders accepted funding from Y Combinator, well-known for helping to financially accelerate startups in the broader crypto space — startups that often issue their own crypto tokens — as opposed to Bitcoin-only startups.
So what piqued Y Combinator’s interest in Theya?
“Y Combinator doesn’t really invest based on the idea,” said Karnati. “They invest based on the founder’s background.”
Given that Theya’s two other founders — Smeet Bhatt and Vikas Choudary — also have impressive résumés and extensive experience working in tech, logistics and finance, it isn’t hard to imagine why Y Combinator was interested.
However, Y Combinator appreciated more than just the backgrounds of Theya’s founders.
“They also love our mission,” said Karnati.
“There’s a clear space for us to build. Everybody wants to make quick money. Everybody wants to create a token and stuff like that, and they thought ‘These guys are doing something different and filling a gap where you don’t really have big products,’” he added.
Karnati’s Bitcoin Conviction
Considering that Karnati has the chops as a developer to work for seemingly any technology company, one has to ask: Why focus on Bitcoin?
“I read Satoshi’s whitepaper in 2014 and kind of understood it,” Karnati recalled. “Then, I read Andreas’ Mastering Bitcoin to understand better how it works.”
But it wasn’t Karnati’s theoretical grasp on Bitcoin that made him a believer.
“Then, I bought a little bit of Bitcoin and made a transaction on-chain,” he said.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Wow, like this is real.’ I was able to move my own money permissionlessly. It was so obvious that this has to be the future of money,” he added.
When Karnati juxtaposed this experience in transacting with bitcoin with his experience in sending international remittances from South Korea, where he lived while working for Samsung, to India he experienced one of Bitcoin’s main value propositions — cheap and fast remittances.
“There was a lot of KYC, a lot of verification and it was super slow,” said Karnati of the process of sending a remittance payment via the traditional financial rails. “Sometimes there were some failures, as well, and it was very costly — there was a 1.5% fee on top of foreign exchange fees.”
After this experience, Karnati also learned about and experimented with other blockchains, only to come back to Bitcoin once he became more fully aware of one of bitcoin’s other main attributes — a store of value.
“I realized the most important thing is the store of value,” said Karnati regarding what separates bitcoin from other digital assets.
This is part of what prompted him to create a product that made storing the private keys to that store of value easier and safer.
What’s Next For Theya?
Aside from providing users with a premier multisig vault experience, Karnati and the team at Theya have further aspirations for their app.
“Payments is definitely an area into which we want to grow,” said Karnati. “We want to make it easy for merchants to accept payments and for someone to offer a subscription service.”
However, he added that integrating Lightning isn’t next on the docket for Theya.
Karnati and his team are more intent right now on introducing an exchange into the app so that users can purchase bitcoin within the app and send it directly to cold storage. Part of his motivation for including such a feature comes from taking note of the shortcomings of other Bitcoin and crypto exchanges in the space, including one for which he used to work — Robinhood.
“Some of our users have a Coinbase or Robinhood account,” explained Karnati.
“[These platforms] have limits to withdrawals, which is a hassle for [users]. With what we’re making, you can buy directly to the self-custodial vault,” he added, proving the point that convenience and top-notch security can co-exist in one app.