Plenty of young people launch startups, but Rodri Fernández Touza may be the first to jump into crypto from a monastery. In 2021, he abandoned his postgraduate studies at Stanford and Harvard University to live as a Buddhist monk in upstate New York. While Touza enjoyed meditation, it was the midst of the NFT craze, and he was too excited about the market to stay on the sidelines. “I was in the temple with everyone else, and I couldn't think of anything else but building,” he told Fortune.
After four months, Touza left the monastery, and, in 2022, he launched Crossmint, a platform for developers to add crypto functionality to their code. On Tuesday, he announced that his company had raised $23.6 million across a seed, series A, and strategic funding round.
