Aptos CEO Mo Shaikh shares his journey to web3 and market opportunities in Asia and Middle East
TechCrunch sat down with Shaikh this week at the Korea Blockchain Week 2024 conference in Seoul to talk about Aptos' expansion; its partnerships with major Asian web2 companies; and how Aptos uses blockchain to make financial transactions seamless and cost-effective.
As a young immigrant in Brooklyn, Mo Shaikh often pondered over his father’s taxi earnings. His father would say he made $100, but Shaikh couldn’t understand why only $60 made it home. (The rest, he learned, went to intermediaries.) This early experience sparked his curiosity about financial systems, but also their shortcomings and the need for change.
Shaikh went on to study finance, economics and psychology at Hunter College, then got an MBA at University of Rochester. After he graduated, he started to cut his teeth in the professional world at places like BlackRock and Boston Consulting Group. But it was his move first to blockchain startup Consensys, and then Meta to work on its cryptocurrency efforts, that he realized that this was the solution to the inefficiencies he’d been witnessing since he was a child.
“I knew this was the place that I wanted to be,” he said.
Together with Avery Ching, he co-founded Aptos in 2021.
It’s been a wild ride for Shaikh and Aptos. Within three months of leaving Meta in December 2021 and founding the startup, it raised $200 million at a valuation of over $1 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Just three months after that, it raised another $150 million. But the wild ride had some bumps: Its investors included the ill-fated FTX.
In the interim the company has continued to grow while also weathering many of the same problems other crypto companies have faced. In April, it launched Aptos Ascend, a full stack of financial features.
And now Aptos and Shaikh have their eye on expanding in Asia.
Aptos is already working with local partners. It announced on Friday a partnership with Libre, an investment infrastructure startup focused on tokenizing financial assets. Libre is a joint venture launched by Japanese bank Nomura’s digital asset unit Laser Digital and hedge fund Brevan Howard’s fintech and web3 incubation hub WebN Group.