It is our pleasure to welcome IBEX to the Fulgur Ventures portfolio. Founded in 2018 by Jose Luis Lemus and headquartered in Miami, IBEX began as a Bitcoin OTC desk in Latin America and evolved into one of the earliest, and most ambitious, Lightning-as-a-Service providers in the world. The company built the Lightning rails behind El Salvador's state-issued Chivo Wallet during the 2021 legal-tender rollout, an experience that taught the team how to operate Lightning at national scale.

That operating know-how is now packaged into IBEXHub, IBEX's flagship product: a modular API platform that lets fintechs, banks, telecoms, point-of-sale providers, and developers add Lightning send, receive, settlement, and off-ramp capabilities without ever managing a node, channel, or liquidity position. IBEX handles the infrastructure underneath; customers handle the customer.

This fits the Fulgur thesis precisely. We believe Bitcoin and Lightning will absorb a meaningful share of cross-border payments and remittances over the next decade, and that the path to that future runs through infrastructure that meets traditional financial institutions where they are: behind a clean REST API, with predictable settlement, compliance-aware tooling, and enterprise-grade reliability. IBEX is one of very few teams that has actually shipped this in production with regulated counterparties.

What sets Jose and the IBEX team apart is the combination of regulatory fluency, regional depth across the Americas, and a real conviction that Lightning is the settlement layer of the future. We are excited to support IBEX as it expands LaaS to more institutions and continues to bring fintech onto Bitcoin's open monetary network.