Eco

Eco

Eco was founded in 2018 by Garrett Camp, the serial entrepreneur behind Uber and StumbleUpon, alongside CEO Andy Bromberg. Camp's track record in consumer platforms provided the founding architectural conviction: Eco was not built as a conventional neobank but as a digital wallet embedded with token incentives, designed to align user outcomes with network growth. The firm launched its core wallet product to US consumers, offering high-yield returns on deposits alongside cashback rewards, funded by the interchange and lending economics that traditional banks retain. The platform's strategy bridges consumer fintech and crypto-native incentives. Eco deploys deposited capital into traditional fixed-income instruments and decentralized finance protocols to generate yield, then distributes rewards to users in the form of Eco Points and a native digital token. Early product iterations emphasized a savings-like experience with spending features added over time. The wallet integrates with existing payment rails while layering on-chain rewards, a design that attracted prominent venture backing. Notable funders include a16z, Founders Fund, and Pantera Capital, who participated in the company's Series C in 2021. Eco's user base is concentrated in the United States, with product development centered in San Francisco. As a venture-backed company rather than a licensed bank, Eco partners with chartered institutions for custody and FDIC insurance, keeping its own balance sheet light. The firm has not publicly disclosed assets under management or total deposits, operating instead on growth metrics typical of private consumer technology companies. In March 2023, Eco announced it had raised a total of $95 million across multiple funding rounds, including a $60 million raise led by a16z and L Catterton (per TechCrunch, March 2023). The leadership team includes veterans from Uber, Airbnb, and Goldman Sachs. Eco's structural distinction lies in its tokenized rewards architecture — a consumer wallet that doesn't just compete on rates but restructures the relationship between the platform and its users through token ownership. This differs from both traditional challenger banks, which rely on interchange fees alone, and pure DeFi protocols, which lack consumer-grade interfaces and regulated fiat on-ramps. The model places Eco at an intermediary layer, where regulatory posture around token distributions and depository partnerships will determine whether the company scales as a payments utility or remains a well-funded experiment.