Company Name: They one
Founders: Sriram Bhargav Karnati, Smeet Bhatt and Vikas Choudhary
Foundation date: December 2022
Headquarters location: San Francisco, CA
Amount of bitcoin held in treasury: “It is significant.”
Number of employees: 7
Website: https://www.theya.us/
Public or private? Private
Sriram Bhargav Karnati believes that top-notch security and ease of use are not mutually exclusive when it comes to managing your bitcoin.
So he and his co-founders in They one They have built a multisig bitcoin vault (a mechanism that requires multiple participants to sign a bitcoin transaction) that users can conveniently manage from their mobile devices.
“Our mission is to make self-custody 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 brilliant products that everyday people can use. But if you look at bitcoin, we don’t have a product that’s super easy for everyone to use without having to become a security engineer or have technical knowledge,” he added.
“We want to make it really easy to bring people in and make long-term storage really convenient.”
Combining Karnati’s experience building consumer products for large companies like Google and Robinhood with his deep understanding of bitcoin, it seems there may be no better person for the task of bringing bitcoin multisig vaults to the masses.
A Silicon Valley star goes bitcoin
Growing up in Mumbai, Karnati dreamed of working in Silicon Valley.
He got the opportunity in 2014 when he started working at Google, where he contributed to several of the company's products.
“At Google, I didn’t work on a single team,” Karnati said.
“I have tried almost every product you use: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Ads… everything,” he added.
“The most important lesson I learned from this was, ‘How do you build the system from scratch and scale it to billions of users?’ and also, ‘How do people think about using a product?’”
In 2021, Karnati found himself at another major 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 did well when it came to user experience.
“When I was working at Robinhood, one of the most important lessons I learned was, ‘How do you take complex financial instruments and make them super simple?’” Karnati explained. “We were basically giving everyone access to join the world of 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 as expected — with users holding bitcoin in self-custody — then it needs to become easier to use a non-custodial bitcoin wallet or vault.
Enter Theya: a dynamic and secure solution for bitcoin self-custody.
How Theya works
Theya vaults employ a 2-of-3 multisig setup, meaning that two of the three private key holders must give approval to send bitcoins from the vault for the transaction to go through. Theya holds one of the keys while the user(s) hold the other two.
What's unique about Theya is that it's the first multi-signature solution that doesn't require the use of a hardware wallet, devices that Karnati believes are intimidating for new bitcoin users.
“Mobile multi-signature is for people who don’t have a hardware wallet, but still want to have self-custody with more than one single-signature (device),” Karnati explained.
“You can create a family wallet with your spouse. That kind of product didn’t exist before Theya,” he added.
“They can start with multisig and as they accumulate more and more bitcoins, 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 Theya team are aware that not everyone will jump into a multisig setup right away, especially one that comes with a price tag attached.
Given Theya’s mission to onboard 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,” he said, “and you can create as many wallets as you want.”
Karnati added that the free single-signature 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 away part of its product for free in order to fulfill its mission?
One of the most prominent venture capital (VC) firms in the broader crypto and technology space: Y Combinator, that's who.
Why Y Combinator?
To get Theya off the ground, Karnati and his co-founders accepted funding from Y Combinatorknown for helping to financially accelerate startups in the broader crypto space (startups that often issue their own crypto tokens), as opposed to startups that only use bitcoin.
So what sparked Y Combinator's interest in Theya?
“Y Combinator doesn’t invest based on the idea,” Karnati said. “They invest based on the founder’s track record.”
Given that Theya's other two founders, Smeet Bhatt and Vikas Choudary, also have impressive resumes and extensive experience working in technology, logistics and finance, it's not hard to imagine why Y Combinator was interested.
However, Y Combinator valued more than just the backgrounds of Theya's founders.
“They also love our mission,” Karnati said.
“We have a clear space to build. Everybody wants to make money fast. Everybody wants to create a token and stuff like that, and they thought, ‘These guys are doing something different and filling a gap where there really aren’t any great products,’” he added.
Karnati's conviction on bitcoin
Considering that Karnati has the developer skills to work for virtually any tech company, one has to ask: Why focus on bitcoin?
“I read Satoshi's book bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf”>White paper “I understood it in 2014,” Karnati recalled. “Then I read Andreas's book. amazon.com/Mastering-bitcoin-Programming-Open-Blockchain/dp/1491954388″>Mastering bitcoin “to better understand how it works.”
But it wasn't Karnati's theoretical understanding of bitcoin that made him a believer.
“I then bought some bitcoin and made an on-chain transaction,” he said.
“At that moment I thought, ‘Wow, this is real.’ I was able to move my own money without being asked. It was obvious that this was the future of money,” he added.
When Karnati compared this experience of transacting with bitcoin to his experience of sending international remittances from South Korea, where he lived while working for Samsung, to India, he experienced one of bitcoin’s key value propositions: cheap and fast remittances.
“There was a lot of KYC, a lot of verification, and it was very slow,” Karnati said of the process of sending a remittance payment through traditional financial channels. “There were also some glitches at times, and it was very expensive – there was a 1.5% fee on top of foreign exchange fees.”
After this experience, Karnati also learned and experimented with other blockchains, only to return to bitcoin once he became more aware of one of bitcoin's other core attributes: a store of value.
“I realized that the most important thing is the store of value,” Karnati said of what separates bitcoin from other digital assets.
This is part of what drove him to create a product that made storing the private keys to that store of value easier and more secure.
What's next for Theya?
In addition to providing users with a top-notch multi-signature vault experience, Karnati and the Theya 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 for someone to be able to offer a subscription service.”
However, he added that Lightning integration is not the next step on Theya's agenda.
Karnati and his team are most interested in introducing an in-app exchange so that users can buy bitcoins within the app and send them directly to cold storage. Part of his motivation for including this feature comes from taking note of the shortcomings of other bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges in the space, including one he used to work for: Robinhood.
“Some of our users have a Coinbase or Robinhood account,” Karnati explained.
“(These platforms) have limits on withdrawals, which is a pain for (users). With what we are doing, you can buy directly from the self-custody vault,” he added, proving that convenience and top-notch security can coexist in an app.
