Company Name: Thea
Founders: Sriram Bhargav Karnataki, Samit Bhatt and Vikas Chaudhary
Date of Establishment: December 2022
Headquarter Location: San Francisco, California
Amount of Bitcoin in the vault: “It’s important.”
Number of Employees: 7
website: https://www.theya.us/
Public or private? private
Sriram Bhargav Karnati believes that superior security and ease of use are not mutually exclusive when it comes to managing your Bitcoin.
So, he and his co-founders in Thea They built a multi-signature Bitcoin vault — a mechanism that requires multiple participants to sign a Bitcoin transaction — that users can easily manage from their mobile devices.
“Our mission is to make self-guarding easy for everyone,” Karnati said.
“If you look at all the trillion-dollar companies — all the big tech companies: Apple, Google, Facebook — they all have great products that ordinary people can use,” he added. “But if you look at bitcoin, you don’t find a product that anyone can easily use without having to be a security engineer or have technical expertise.”
“We really want to make it really easy for people to integrate and make long-term storage really convenient.”
With Karnati’s background building consumer products for major companies like Google and Robinhood combined with his deep understanding of Bitcoin, there seems to be no better person for the task of bringing multi-signature Bitcoin vaults to the masses.
A Silicon Valley Star Moves to Bitcoin
Karnati grew up in Mumbai, dreaming of working in Silicon Valley.
He got the opportunity in 2014 when he started working at Google, where he contributed to a number of the company’s products.
“At Google, I didn’t work on just one team,” Karnati recalls.
“It touched almost every product you use: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Ads — everything,” he added.
“The biggest lesson I learned from that was, ‘How do you build a system from scratch and scale it to billions of users? ’ and also, ‘How do people think about using the 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 has accomplished when it comes to user experience.
“When I was at Robinhood, one of the most important lessons I learned was, ‘How do you take complex financial instruments and make them really simple?’” Karnati explained. “(We were) basically giving everyone the ability 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 to grow the way it was meant to — with users storing Bitcoin in self-custodial custody — it must become easier to use a Bitcoin wallet or non-custodial vault.
Enter Theya – the dynamic and secure solution for self-custody of Bitcoin.
How does Thea work?
Theya vaults use a 2-of-3 multisig system, which means that two of the three private key holders must sign off on sending bitcoin from the vault for the transaction to go through. They hold one of the keys while the users hold the other two.
What sets Theya apart is that it is the first multi-signature solution that doesn’t require the use of a hardware wallet — hardware that Karnati believes is intimidating to new Bitcoin users.
“Mobile multisiges are for people who don’t have a hardware wallet, but still want to do self-custody with more than one single-signature device,” Karnati explained.
“You can create a family portfolio with you and your wife. This type of product didn’t exist before Thea came along,” he added.
“(They can) start with multi-signature, and as they accumulate more and more bitcoin, they can slowly upgrade to a hardware wallet and set up a cold storage setup.”
For this service, Theya charges an annual fee of $199.
However, Karnati and the Thea team realize that not everyone will opt for a multi-signature setup right away, especially one that comes with a price tag attached.
Given Theya’s mission to bring as many people as possible into self-custody, Karnati explained that Theya also offers a free non-custodial wallet option.
“The single-signature mobile wallet is free, and you can create an unlimited number of wallets,” he added.
The free single-signature offering is also compatible with hardware wallets, Karnati added. 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.
But who would invest in a company that gives away a portion of its products for free in an effort to achieve its mission?
One of the most prominent venture capital (VC) firms in the crypto and broader tech space – Y Combinator – is from.
Why Y Combinator?
In order for Karnati and his founders to launch Thea, they accepted funding from Y complexknown for helping financially accelerate startups in the broader crypto space — startups that often issue their own crypto tokens — as opposed to startups that only work in Bitcoin.
So what got Y Combinator interested in Theya?
“Y Combinator doesn’t actually invest based on the idea, they invest based on the founder’s background,” Karnati said.
And since Theya’s other founders — Samit Bhatt and Vikas Chaudhary — also have impressive resumes and extensive experience working in technology, logistics, and finance, it’s not hard to imagine why Y Combinator would be interested.
However, Y Combinator valued more than just Theya’s founders’ backgrounds.
“They love our mission, too,” Karnati added.
“There’s a clear space for us to build,” he added. “Everyone wants to make money quickly. Everyone wants to create a token and things like that, and we thought, ‘Hey, these guys are doing something different and filling a gap where there aren’t really any great products.’”
Karnati’s Bitcoin Conviction
Given that Karnati has the potential as a developer to work for seemingly any tech company, we have to ask: Why the focus on Bitcoin?
“I read Satoshi’s book.” White papers “In 2014, I kind of realized it,” Karnati recalls. “Then I read Andreas’ book Mastering Bitcoin To better understand how it works.”
But it wasn’t Karnati’s theoretical understanding of Bitcoin that made him a believer.
“Then I bought a small amount of bitcoin and made a transaction on the chain,” he said.
“At that moment, I felt like this was real. I was able to move my money without permission. It was clear that this was the future of money,” he added.
When Karnati compared this experience of dealing with Bitcoin to his experience sending international money transfers from South Korea, where he lived while working for Samsung, to India, he experienced one of the great advantages of Bitcoin — cheap and fast money transfers.
“There were a lot of customer verification processes, and it was very slow. Sometimes there were some failures as well, and it was very expensive – there was a 1.5% fee plus foreign exchange fees,” Karnati said of the process of sending remittance payments via traditional financial rail.
After this experience, Karnati also learned about and experimented with other blockchains, only to return to Bitcoin when he became fully aware of one of Bitcoin’s other key features – its storage of value.
“I realized that the most important thing is the store of value,” Karnati said of what sets Bitcoin apart from other digital assets.
This is part of what drove him to create a product that makes storing private keys to a store of value easier and more secure.
What’s next for Thea?
Besides providing users with a multi-signature vault experience, Karnati and the Thea team have other aspirations for their app.
“Payments is definitely an area we want to grow in,” Karnati said. “We want to make it easier for merchants to accept payments and offer a subscription service to anyone.”
However, he added that Lightning integration is not the next step on Thea’s agenda.
Karnati and his team now plan to introduce an in-app exchange so users can buy bitcoins within the app and send them directly to cold storage. Part of his motivation for including such a feature comes from noticing the shortcomings of other bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges in the space, including the one he used to work for — Robinhood.
“Some of our users have an account on Coinbase or Robinhood,” Karnati explained.
“These platforms have restrictions on withdrawals, which is a problem for users. With ours, you can buy directly from the self-guarded vault,” he added, proving that convenience and top-notch security can coexist in one app.