For many kids, exposure to their parents’ occupations greatly influences their professional trajectories. It can either motivate or hinder the pursuit of a particular career path, especially if that path happens to be a family business.

For Raj Brahmbhatt, his father’s telecom business laid the groundwork for his interest in telecommunications. The industry piqued his curiosity from a young age, culminating with the launch of Zeebu—the blockchain-based settlement platform for telecom prepayments—for which Brahmbhatt is the founder and chief executive officer.

Zeebu had its full-scale launch in September 2023, and has since settled close to $5 billion in transactions to date. The platform has over 138 active institutional clients—such as Novatel, Telecom Egypt and Vodafone—and has generated $82 million in just 15 months.

“What interested me was the fact that telco operators collectively connect every single person all around the world,” Brahmbhatt said to me during a recent interview. “That was a very interesting piece for me, and I was incentivized to get a better understanding of how the infrastructure worked and learn what the struggles were. Most importantly, it’s where I identified the problem statement that Zeebu was created to solve.”

Telecom prepayments

Brahmbhatt’s vision for Zeebu is to modernize the telecom industry’s payment infrastructure and bring it into the 21st century—a mission that began after talking with a few guys from his family’s telco company and listening to the struggles they had with international cross-border payments.

Around that same time, Brahmbhatt was being reintroduced to blockchain and was experimenting with its potential.

After first being exposed to Bitcoin in 2016 and then forgetting about it, Brahmbhatt began purchasing digital assets in 2019—Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP—and went to dinner with a few of his friends for an experience that further catalyzed his desire to pursue blockchain tech.

“One of my buddies asked me to Venmo him afterward, but that week, I’d hit my Venmo limit,” Brahmbhatt said. “So he said I could send him crypto instead. I sent him Bitcoin, which was instantaneous, and I realized there was no limit. No one could stop me from sending or receiving a certain amount of this.”

A lightbulb went off, and Brahmbhatt realized blockchain might provide a viable solution to the cross-border payments problems within the telco industry.

“At that point in time, I thought to myself—why not create a Bitcoin-like solution specifically for telco companies, where they have easy fiat onramp/offramp and also easy settlement,” Brahmbhatt said. “This sounded good in thesis but required a lot of pulling things together from VC partners and getting a much deeper understanding of blockchain technology as a whole.”

Telecom companies prepay to have voice, data and messaging capacity at the ready to smoothly run their global networks. This so-called “telecom prepayment industry” does an estimated $120 billion in transactions per year. Zeebu offers a blockchain-based settlement system that offers better transparency, reduces transaction costs and lessens settlement times, making the industry more efficient. 

Valuit

Fortunately, while Brahmbhatt was conceiving Zeebu, he was also building Valuit—an asset tokenization company and lending and borrowing platform for real world assets. As he got deeper into the blockchain space with Valuit, Brahmbhatt was able to apply his newfound knowledge to Zeebu.

Brahmbhatt says the platform is similar to PayPal, with infrastructure that has slowly moved to a more decentralized operation. The company now has on-chain clearing houses verifying every invoice and settlement.

“When you look at blockchain technology itself, it was always meant for mass adoption because there is scope for it to solve real-world problems,” Brahmbhatt said. “The problem is, for a chunky part of blockchain’s history, product developers and founders haven’t been focused on mass adoption. Everyone’s been building products to be consumed by ecosystem-native people who don’t necessarily need to abstract away complexity.”

In Zeebu’s case, Brahmbhatt opted for the reverse approach of identifying real world problems and then seeing if blockchain technology could solve them.

“Ninety percent of the time, we found that blockchain technology actually does solve the problem very easily,” Brahmbhatt said. “But as far as adoption goes, I had to make sure I abstracted away risk and complexity for the user. I don’t view blockchain technology as a binary thing when it comes to worldwide applications, though a lot of people do. I see it as a very important tool that will help us solve a large chunk of problems when it comes to value transfers, stored value and supply chain.”

Decentralizing the protocol

Today, Zeebu is moving forward into its decentralized protocol for the payments ecosystem as a whole.

“We realized why keep this technology, network and liquidity only for the for-profit payments companies when we can make it an independent network, such as Ethereum, where multiple consumers can become contributors to the network and also become consumers of the network and build their own businesses,” Brahmbhatt said. “We’ve already soft-launched, and over the coming months, you’ll see Zeebu protocol be fully launched and accessible to any potential contributor who wants to participate in this ecosystem.”

lead image: Raj Brahmbhatt