Stablecoin payments startup Velocity raised another $10 million from investors including Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures and Ripple, extending its Series A to $48 million at a $200 million post-money valuation. The London-based company builds infrastructure that lets banks and payment firms settle transactions in stablecoins without replacing their existing systems.
The extension follows a $38 million Series A announced in July, which chief executive Eric Queathem said was oversubscribed. Haun Ventures, Translink Capital and Mirana Ventures also joined the new round. Queathem told CoinDesk the fresh capital will fund work with issuers, acquirers, payment providers, financial institutions and merchants worldwide.
Plumbing, not wallets
Velocity’s pitch is deliberately unglamorous. The company targets the back-end layer of global payment rails: settlement, reconciliation, liquidity management and treasury operations. Queathem previously worked at Worldpay, which processes more than $2 trillion in annual payment volume, and said that experience showed him the problem is not consumer payments but the plumbing behind them. Moving money between institutions still involves prefunded accounts, batch settlement windows and manual reconciliation, all of which cost time and working capital.
Chief growth officer Matt Larson expects most of the shift to stay invisible to end users. “It probably doesn’t lead to all of us switching to have stablecoin wallets as users,” he told CoinDesk. Instead, he expects corporate and institutional capital to move onchain, creating demand for reconciliation, treasury management and connectivity between blockchains and banking systems.
Visa framed its investment in similar terms. “Stablecoins are playing an increasingly important role in reshaping how value moves across the Visa ecosystem,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, in a statement. He described Velocity as building infrastructure to bring “stablecoin-powered money movement to every business.”
Why the big names are buying in
The investor list reads like a map of the stablecoin establishment. Circle issues USDC, the second-largest dollar stablecoin. Ripple runs its own RLUSD token, which added over $1 billion in market cap this year and recently hit a record $2.44 billion in circulation. Visa has run USDC settlement pilots with merchants and acquirers since 2021. Haun Ventures, meanwhile, previously backed Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe for $1.1 billion, and BVNK, a similar payments platform.
“Haun Ventures had early conviction in stablecoin infrastructure,” said Chris Ahn, partner at the firm. “Velocity represents the next evolution of that thesis.” He argued stablecoins are moving beyond faster transactions to become a layer of global finance that institutions embed directly into payment and treasury operations.
Translink Capital’s participation adds a bridge to corporate and institutional partners across Asia, where cross-border settlement costs remain high and banking hours limit when money can move. Velocity says its platform makes money movement more continuous, reduces reliance on prefunding and extends settlement beyond traditional banking hours.
A crowded but fast-growing field
Velocity is not alone in chasing this market. BVNK, Bridge and a handful of other startups offer stablecoin settlement layers, and the big card networks have built their own capabilities in-house. What distinguishes the sector this year is who is funding it: the incumbents themselves. When the companies that own the existing rails put money into the companies building the new ones, the message is that both expect the two to coexist, with stablecoins sitting underneath card payments rather than replacing them.
The funding also lands amid strong numbers for the stablecoin sector overall. Total stablecoin market cap sits near $290 billion, with roughly $91 billion in daily transfer volume. Circle’s new Arc blockchain launched its public mainnet this week with USDC as its native gas asset, and traders briefly paid a premium for USDC on the new chain before launch.
Regulatory clarity is pulling in the same direction. The United States passed federal stablecoin legislation last year, giving banks a legal framework for issuing and holding tokenized dollars, and jurisdictions from the European Union to Singapore have rolled out their own regimes. That framework is what makes corporate treasury operations on stablecoin rails practical for companies with compliance departments, not just crypto-native firms.
The competitive question is whether infrastructure startups can move faster than the in-house teams at the card networks themselves. Visa and Mastercard have both shipped stablecoin settlement products directly, and a bank choosing a vendor today could equally choose to build. Velocity’s answer is neutrality: it works across multiple stablecoins, chains and banking partners, which a single network’s in-house product cannot easily promise.
The timing also reflects a shift in how the largest stablecoin issuers see their own role. Circle has been building outward from issuance into full blockchain infrastructure with Arc, while Ripple has pushed RLUSD into institutional custody and trading venues. Both want a layer of application companies above them, and backing firms like Velocity is a cheaper way to grow that ecosystem than acquiring it later.
For Velocity, the test now is execution. The $48 million Series A gives it runway, and its investors give it distribution: a startup embedded in Visa’s ecosystem, Circle’s issuance stack and Ripple’s enterprise network has doors open that most seed-stage firms spend years trying to knock on. Whether those doors turn into paying customers is the next thing to watch. The company has not disclosed revenue figures or customer counts, and neither has most of its competition, which is typical for infrastructure firms this size but leaves the valuation resting on the sector’s momentum rather than its books.