VALR

Fintech · Sandton, South Africa · Founded 2018

VALR is a South African cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2018 by Farzam Ehsani, Chris T, Theo Bohnen, and Badi Sudhakaran. The company provides a platform for users to buy, sell, and trade a variety of cryptocurrencies using the South African Rand (ZAR). Farzam Ehsani, the CEO, was previously the Chairperson of the South African Financial Blockchain Consortium, bringing a wealth of experience in the blockchain industry to the company. VALR has grown to become the largest crypto exchange in Africa by trading volume and is expanding its services globally, with a focus on Asia. The platform serves both retail customers and corporate and professional traders. In addition to its exchange services, VALR offers VALR Pay, a feature that allows users to make free peer-to-peer payments. The company has a simple and user-friendly interface, making it accessible for both beginners and experienced cryptocurrency traders. Keywords: cryptocurrency exchange, Bitcoin, Ethereum, South African Rand, ZAR, VALR Pay, crypto trading, blockchain, digital assets, financial technology

Valuation $100–500M

Headcount <100

Total funding $50–100M

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Investors

16 investors on VALR's cap table

Sourced from Dealroom's funding history. Investor profile links are shown where available.

Seed 3 investors entered at this stage

Montegray Capital

Michael Jordaan

Bittrex

Series A 13 investors entered at this stage

10x

Michael Jordan

4Di Capital

100x Ventures

Pantera Capital

Third Prime Capital

Coinbase Ventures

Cadenza

GSR Ventures

CMT Digital Ventures

Distributed Global

Alameda Research

Avon Ventures

Global footprint

Where VALR has talent and traffic

Workforce by country

8 countries with
team presence

🇿🇦 South Africa67.9%

🇺🇸 United States10.7%

🇬🇧 United Kingdom3.6%

🇲🇾 Malaysia3.6%

🇭🇺 Hungary3.6%

Top 5 of 8 shown

Talent graph

The shape of VALR's talent

Dealroom maps VALR's team person by person — pinpointing the standout operators and scoring them across the six dimensions investors underwrite. The counts and shape below are a public preview; the named individuals and exact scores live in the platform.

9 team members profilednamed & role-tagged by Dealroom

36 employeestotal headcount

5 executives & foundersidentified by name

DimensionScore

AI Talent

Engineering

Product

Go-to-market

Leadership

Research

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Source: Dealroom Talent Intelligence. Public profiles show counts and the team's shape only — request a demo for the named individuals, per-person seniority and tenure, and team benchmarks vs peers.

Market sentiment

What the market is saying about VALR

An AI-synthesized read of the highest-engagement posts about VALR on X over the past 7 days. We rank by likes & retweets, ignore corporate channels, and surface the themes that broke out from real people.

Reading the room on X — pulling top posts and synthesizing themes…

Source: X recent search ranked by engagement (likes + retweets) · Synthesis by Claude · Cached for 1 hour

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