About Crestone Venture Capital
Crestone Venture Capital is a fintech-focused venture fund founded in 2019 by Kai Schmitz and Inanc Balci, with an Asia office in Makati alongside its Washington, D.C. and Sao Paulo offices, a deliberately global structure built around one specific thesis rather than one specific country. Crestone looks for the same underlying pattern across very different emerging markets: large, young, digitally-native populations with fast-growing GDP and urbanization but still-low penetration of formal financial services, and it backs the fintech infrastructure and embedded-finance companies built to close that gap. In the Philippines specifically, its confirmed portfolio includes Peddlr, a digital ledger and point-of-sale app that helps small sari-sari-store-style merchants manage inventory, bookkeeping, and a B2B marketplace in one place, and OneLot, which is building the software, data, and financing layer for the country's roughly $13 billion used-car dealership market. Both are the kind of unglamorous, high-volume, financial-inclusion-adjacent businesses that fit Crestone's stated thesis exactly, rather than headline-grabbing consumer apps.
Investment Thesis
Crestone invests at seed and early stage in embedded fintech, financial infrastructure, and other financial-services-enablement businesses across emerging markets with genuinely underpenetrated formal finance, Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), Latin America, and Africa. It looks specifically for founders solving a real, structural financial-inclusion gap (small-merchant bookkeeping and payments, informal-market financing, embedded lending) rather than building a copy of a Western consumer fintech app, and its own confirmed Philippine investments (Peddlr, OneLot) both target underserved MSME and informal-sector finance rather than banked consumers.
Portfolio Companies
Peddlr, OneLot