With Navra, co-founders (and spouses) Mike Cagney and June Ou seek to solve blockchain’s accessibility issue.

“The problem that we've created in blockchain,” Cagney said, “is we've been building for this native crypto audience, but not for the real world.”

Navra is the newest brainchild of Cagney, who co-founded both SoFi and Figure. Navra recently raised a $19 million Series A to bridge traditional finance onto the blockchain.

“It's really not been accessible for a retail customer at SoFi, or a hedge fund in New York City, or all these folks [whose dollars] we really need to go after,” Cagney said.

Navra’s platform is a single interface that gives access to multiple blockchain venues, and it’s available both directly and through white-label partnerships. Navra allows retail users to manage their entire cryptocurrency portfolios in one place, with access to lending, borrowing and trading solutions, according to the company. Institutional investors can also manage enterprise teams.

Cagney built Navra in a week, he said, alongside two artifivial intelligence agents that essentially kept building upon each other’s work.

“I went to the first one and I gave it a bunch of use cases, best practices of design and so forth, and it built a prototype,” he said. “I took the second and said, ‘Look, I'm a 65-year-old SoFi customer, and I don't understand blockchain. Show me all the things that are going to confuse me about this app and fix them.’”

The current blockchain world is bifurcated, Cagney said. On one hand, apps like Robinhood have “a great user experience, but they control your assets [because] you don’t self-custody,” he said. On the other hand, crypto wallets like MetaMask and Phantom give users the benefit of self-custody, but carry a big learning curve for the average person.

Cagney said Navra is meant to solve three key issues: better user experience, qualified self-custody, and enterprise control. About 30,000 people are on Navra’s waitlist, he said. The company will start onboarding them in the coming weeks.

Navra’s fundraising round was led by Ribbit Capital, Baseline and DCM, all of which were founding Figure investors. Jump Crypto and Figure Technology Solutions also contributed.

With two multibillion-dollar companies under his belt (one of which, Figure, he’s still a part of), Cagney said lessons from prior projects resonate today.

As a founder, “you learn an incredible amount, and your first one is usually a lot of trial by error, and so you kind of want to do a second because you're going to build off of all the mistakes you made in the first,” he said. “You can make mistakes all along the way, and so every time you get things you can improve and build on.”

The culture at SoFi “tended to be very performance-driven, and that led to problems that we had within the organization,” Cagney said. With Figure, he and his earliest employees spent the first few months exploring what they wanted to do differently.

“At Figure, you have to fit culturally before we even get to the resume. That just created a very different organization,” Cagney said.

But after building Figure and taking it public, he also realized he didn’t want to build a big company again, which led him to Navra’s a-man-and-two-AI-agents creation story.

“It was my ‘a-ha’ moment of, hey, I don't need 100 people. I can do this with 10, and that's a very different construct [when they’re] 10 people that you know, that you've worked with for the last 20 years,” Cagney said. “It’s actually a pretty fun thing to do, and not have to deal with all the overhead that comes with hundreds of employees and tons of investors.”