STARTUPS CASE STUDY
How Grupa has helped connect this startup to a Staff-level Engineer at Meta
Jul 12, 2022
Afriex is a money transfer system that helps individuals and families transfer money overseas. It is designed to enable users to send funds by converting them into stablecoins which are cryptocurrencies backed by reserve assets. This process makes transactions easier, quicker, and affordable.
Building a global payment company requires a lot of factors being put in the right place and in the heart of it all is having a quality, stable, and consistent product that gets the work done with ease.
Afriex came to a realization that the founding engineering team wasn’t enough anymore as they needed more technical experts with expertise in the crypto space to join their ever-growing team and help accelerate its product development.
They needed to expand their engineering team and it came with a cost. Outsourcing platforms like Toptal, Turing, and Upwork couldn’t get them the caliber of talents they wanted as pricing didn’t match the value, and long-term hires with below-quality FAANG experience made them revaluate their options.
“The platform we’re building is mission-critical and any little mistake becomes expensive; we couldn’t afford it. The experience of a technical expert being added to the team was very critical for us and we needed the very best that’ll give us value for our money, that’s why we chose Grupa.”
Finding an experienced technical expert was a top priority for Afriex. The founding team needed more hands-on experience as they were expanding to become Africa's leading global payment platform. To solve this problem, Afriex chose Grupa for its talent supply.
“Grupa is giving the small guys the chance to compete with the big guys”.
Grupa recommended 3 top talents that best fit Afriex's preferences. They then proceeded to schedule an introductory meeting with their preferred expert.
After a series of meetings and onboarding calls, the expert joined Afriex's existing product team as a Senior Fullstack Engineer to help build the startup's blockchain money transfer platform. He works full-time at Meta and part-time at Afriex.
Afriex’s expectations were met; they got the caliber of technical expert they needed to build the payment platform.
The quality, responsiveness, expertise, and collaboration skills embodied in the technical expert they were matched with has made Grupa the startup’s one-stop marketplace for top-quality talents.
The instant matching and pool of staff-level technical experts on Grupa is one they’ll continue to leverage on as they expand and grow their company.
“Grupa has helped us figure out our engineering needs by instantly matching an expert with silicon valley experience to collaborate with our team overseas”.
The collaboration with the matched expert from Meta via Grupa has also contributed to the stability and building of a world-class product where anyone can easily send and receive money internationally.
Afriex has seen a massive increase in growth which accumulates to 20% per week, $40m in transactions, and over 100k active users
“Grupa provided an elite engineer from Meta who is instrumental in our world and also feels part of the team”.
Afriex’s long-term goal is to build a truly global bank that enables people to send any currency to anyone anywhere both in fiat and crypto. In pursuit of this, they recently raised a $10m Series A round of funding to expand their operations across Africa, with the expert from Grupa’s marketplace being instrumental to this growth.
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