In 2022, the founders of Sorted came across a $20 feature phone. Not a smartphone. Not a tablet. A basic handset that hundreds of millions of people across Africa and South Asia use as their only connection to the world. The entire crypto industry had looked at that phone and kept building for someone else. Sorted decided to build for it.
This week, that decision got a $4.4M vote of confidence.
10MB. 160 Countries. No Paid Advertising.
Before the funding makes sense, the product needs to. Sorted Wallet is a stablecoin wallet — an app that lets you hold, send, and receive digital dollars — built specifically for the devices most fintech products ignore. It fits in 10MB, which is smaller than most apps use just for their loading screens. It runs on feature phones and low-end Android devices without needing fast internet or significant processing power.
The stablecoin part matters here. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, whose values swing dramatically day to day, stablecoins are digital versions of the US dollar that hold their value. That makes them useful for actual everyday transactions — paying suppliers, sending money home, saving in a currency that doesn’t lose value overnight — rather than speculation. For someone in Nigeria watching the naira slide, or someone in Kenya trying to send money to a family member without a bank account, a stable digital dollar accessible on a basic phone isn’t a crypto product. It’s a practical financial tool.
Since launching in 2022, Sorted has been downloaded more than 500,000 times across 160 countries — including Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Bangladesh — without spending a dollar on paid advertising. That’s not a marketing story. That’s a product-market fit story.
$4.4M and the Investors Behind It
The seed round totals $4.4M, with $3.4M in equity from Tether and Gnosis co-leading, alongside Movement, Angel Invest Group, and angel investors connected to RWA.io. The remaining $1M comes from Vox Solutions, a telecoms infrastructure provider — and that detail matters more than it sounds. It’s not just capital. It’s connectivity infrastructure specifically aimed at strengthening Sorted’s integrations with mobile operators across its target markets. The money comes with rails attached.
The name that anchors the round is Tether. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the short version: Tether is the issuer of USDT, the world’s most widely used stablecoin, with more than 570 million users globally. It’s the largest company in the digital asset industry, and it doesn’t write cheques out of generosity. It backs infrastructure that moves its product into new markets.
That’s exactly what Sorted does. CEO Paolo Ardoino put it plainly: the next wave of stablecoin adoption isn’t coming from the markets everyone is already fighting over. It’s coming from the hundreds of millions of people who can’t afford smartphones or data plans. Sorted is how Tether reaches them.
The Users Nobody Else Was Building For
Here’s who actually uses Sorted. Someone in Kenya who sends money home to a family member who doesn’t have a bank account and can’t receive a transfer the traditional way. Someone in Nigeria holding USDT because the naira has lost too much value too many times to trust as a savings vehicle. Someone in Tanzania who pays a supplier in a currency that arrives in minutes rather than three business days.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the majority of the continent’s population doing real financial work on the only device they have. Stablecoin transaction volumes surpassed $33 trillion globally in 2025 — and almost none of the infrastructure behind that volume was built with a $20 phone in mind. Sorted built almost nothing else.
The Next 100 Million
The funding goes toward expanding across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with deeper telco and mobile operator integrations that make the product work better on the networks most of its users already rely on. CEO Stephen Browne’s framing of what comes next is direct: “Three years ago, we built a wallet for a $20 phone. Nobody else thought it was worth building for. 500,000 downloads later, we know better. This round is how we find the next 100 million.”
Sorted isn’t the only signal that the money is moving in this direction. Tether separately disclosed a strategic investment in remittance platform LemFi this same month, aimed at integrating USDT into remittance corridors serving African and Asian markets — cutting transfer times and costs against traditional cross-border banking. Two bets, same month, same thesis. The biggest players in digital assets are no longer waiting for Africa to catch up to their infrastructure. They’re building infrastructure for Africa specifically.
The crypto industry spent its first decade building for people who already had options. The money is now moving toward the people who don’t. Sorted didn’t wait for that shift. It started there.
