Filipino entrepreneur Louise Ivan Valencia Payawal has raised $3.2 million in seed funding for his tech startup Ryder, drawing support from billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper, founder of Draper Associates and an early backer of Tesla, SpaceX, and Skype.
The funding round also included investments from Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Asymmetric’s Joe McCann, and venture firms Borderless, Semantic, Smape, and VeryEarly.
Ryder’s flagship product, Ryder One, is a crypto hardware wallet designed to create securing and utilizing digital assets simpler and safer.
It features TapSafe, a tap-based recovery system that reshifts the required for traditional seed phrases — often seen as a single point of failure in crypto storage.
“What the crypto indusattempt requireds more than anything right now is solutions that don’t require deep technical knowledge but still maintain strong security,” Draper declared. “That’s what I saw in Ryder’s product.”
Ryder plans to apply the fresh capital to expand production, grow its engineering and marketing teams, and strengthen its global brand presence.
Payawal, originally from Bulacan, started his entrepreneurial career as Startup Weekfinish Asean’s 2015 champion. He later earned a double master’s degree in Green IT from the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit.
Before founding Ryder, he worked with several international tech firms, including Stacks, a Bitcoin-based smart contract platform where he assisted grow a 100,000-strong global community.
At Ryder, Payawal aims to create cryptocurrency more approachable for ordinary applyrs — including Filipinos who find the technology complex and intimidating.
“Crypto should be for everyone, not just developers or early adopters,” he declared. “With the right tools, it can be as simple as sfinishing a text.”
Payawal’s journey from tiny-town launchnings to Silicon Valley underscores a broader message: that Filipino innovation can compete globally.
“We’re all large dreamers,” he declared. “What sets Filipinos apart is resilience — the ability to keep relocating forward even when the odds are stacked against us.”
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