Startup story #2 - Elysium

With a recently launched new wallet and proprietary technology, Elysium makes owning and exchanging crypto assets easy and worry-free thanks to user-friendly keyless onboarding and advanced security. Aron Clementi, Co-founder and CEO, talks about team’s achievements and goals in this short interview.

How did the Elysium story begin?
Very similar to fiat money and bank accounts, if you want to have any digital asset, the first step is to have a wallet. I have been active in the crypto and blockchain space since 2016 and noticed that complex onboarding processes and keys’ management can be a barrier to adoption both in terms of security and user experience. We founded Elysium to tackle this issue.

What is your vision for the project?
At Elysium we aim to enable everyone to use digital assets in a smooth and secure way. We are building a non-custodial wallet with a new onboarding technology to allow users to manage this type of asset and related transactions without any specific knowledge or experience with blockchain and without having to wrap their heads around complex technologies.

Who are your customers?
The digital assets market is still a niche one. Our final goal is to reach everyone who already uses standard payment systems. But before we can reach mass adoption, we are focusing on specific customers first, for example, crypto users and neo-bank users, as well as people who are already familiar with digital payments.

What is the team behind Elysium?
I started Elysium, but it would have been impossible to continue without Gianmarco Guazzo, Co-Founder and CTO. I am very grateful for the extremely dedicated team that works on this project. We met almost all of the team members of Elysium, including our CMO Ilaria Stirpe, through the Bitcoin and blockchain communities or at industry conferences. As a founder, you have to be very careful in the hiring process, especially for the first employees. They need to share the same mindset and feel part of the company’s success.

What have you achieved so far?
In 2023, the team was selected by Tenity, one of the Top 25 FinTech acceleration programmes, to participate in its 11th batch and received the first investment. We then raised further investments from Fulgur Ventures, a Bitcoin-only venture capital. We were also named one of the top 10 in Venture competition's finance vertical and received other awards in blockchain startup ecosystems. However, the biggest achievement until now, is that our wallet is now available for download on the AppStore and Google Play in 30 countries and we are developing our B2B SDK. Our wallet launch marks a key milestone, allowing us to enter users' daily lives.

3 quick questions to wrap it up:

• What motivates you? – Doing what I love. But you cannot rely only on motivation; sometimes, it is just duty that keeps you going
• What is the hardest part of entrepreneurship for you? – The fact that nothing goes as expected
• What does success look like to you? – Build something that makes you proud and generates a positive impact without compromising on personal happiness and wellbeing

For more information on Elysium: https://www.startup.usi.ch/en/node/9517