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HIFI, the New York startup wiring bank rails, stablecoins and Wall Street's tokenized securities into one API, just raised a $37 million Series A
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Welcome to Startup Bios, I'm Brian McCullough.
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Like and subscribe to hear about the newest startups coming out of stealth and raising new rounds almost every day.
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Back in 1968, the New York Stock Exchange had to close every Wednesday.
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Not because of a crash or anything dramatic like that, it was because trading volume had gotten so big that the back offices couldn't keep up with the paperwork. Firms needed a day a week just to catch up on the stock certificates. And the fix, when it finally came, wasn't faster trading. It was rebuilding the plumbing underneath the trading.
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All those paper certificates got parked in one central depository, which is the thing that eventually became DTCC.
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Zach Walsh, the CEO of HIFI, opened his funding announcement with that story, and I think that tells you a lot about how this company sees itself. HIFI announced on Thursday that it has raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. Matthew Miller, a managing partner at Left Lane, is joining the board. VentureBurn reports the other names in the round include Antler, Arcanum Capital, Exitfund, and Side Door Ventures.
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Walsh told Cointelegraph that this is the company's first priced round, which is kind of notable for a company that says it's already moving billions of dollars a year.
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No valuation was disclosed. And the round seems to have come together in pieces. Crypto Potato dug up a 4MD that HIFI Bridge, Inc.
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filed with the SEC on September 3, covering a $27.3 million equity offering, and as of that filing $21.8 million of it had been sold to 24 investors, with the first sale back on August 19th.
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VentureBurn says the $27.3 million tranche closed on September 3, and earlier closes got them the rest of the way to $37 million.
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So, a rolling close, which is pretty common these days.
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Walsh and his cofounder Mo Afifi started the company in New York in 2022, and the pitch is one API that sits between three things that have never talked to each other very well: regular bank rails, stablecoins, and card networks. A business plugs into HIFI once and, they claim, gets USD virtual accounts, instant payouts over RTP, push-to-card payouts, and the ability to mint and redeem stablecoins directly, all through that same integration. HIFI is registered as a money services business, and the way they describe it, they work alongside existing banking partners rather than trying to replace them. The business model is about as simple as it gets, they take a fee on the money that flows through the platform.
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HIFI says it processes more than $7 billion a year in annualized volume, with payouts reaching 87 countries.
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Usage among existing customers is up more than fourfold in the past six months, they say. And the companies building on top of HIFI have, so far, onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individual end users.
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The team is about 35 people, per VentureBurn.
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So, all of that is founder-reported, of course, but if the $7 billion figure is anywhere close to right, that is a lot of money for 35 people to be moving around. VentureBurn also mentions HIFI has done over $227 million in stablecoin payments across 6 million transactions on Polygon alone since January of 2025.
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which is interesting because that's a much smaller number than seven billion. So presumably most of the volume runs elsewhere, either through the bankrails or on other chains, just something to keep in mind when you're squinting at that headline figure.
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The customer they talk about most is
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the Japanese conglomerate, a Fortune Global 500 company, which HIFI says is rebuilding its cash management and trading operations on HIFI's rails.
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Dapper, which I assume is Dapper Labs, the NBA Top Shot folks, is building digital marketplaces on the platform.
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And Arival Bank is using it to power stablecoin payment features for its own customers. Those are three pretty different use cases, which I think is kind of the point they're trying to make.
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On July 15th, DTCC ran production trades, not a sandbox, actual production, using securities held at DTC that had been converted into tokenized form. More than 30 firms took part.
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BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Nasdaq, on and on.
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And HIFI was in there. The trades covered Treasury and repo settlement, equity transactions, securities lending, and collateral workflows.
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HIFI says its part was the tokenized repo pilot, and DTCC is planning to launch its tokenization service for real in October.
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Separately, HIFI says it supported a live tokenized repo trade on Tradeweb between DRW and Marex, settled on the Canton Network, which is a stablecoin called USDCx as the cash leg.
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In plain English, the Treasury collateral and the cash swapped hands at the exact same instant, what the industry calls atomic delivery-versus-payment. Neither side is sitting there waiting on the other. That's the thing HIFI wants to be known for, Then there's Visa.
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Earlier this month HIFI announced a partnership with Visa, and the first product out of that is a stablecoin push-to-card payouts system through Visa Direct. A business holding USDC can convert it and send the money to, they say, more than 4 billion eligible Visa debit and credit cards worldwide. They've also plugged into the Circle Payments Network, which is Circle's own settlement network built around USDC, for more ways to settle. Walsh's framing in the press release, is this, quote, "We think of settlement as one problem, not three.
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Whether it's a stablecoin settling a payment, a tokenized receivable funding a card, or a tokenized security clearing a trade, the underlying event is identical: value moves and settles at the same instant, instead of moving now and settling days later."
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And that's basically the whole pitch, that payments, card spending, and capital markets have always needed three different sets of pipes, and they think one layer can do all three.
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The money is going three places, per Walsh's post.
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More regulatory licenses, so that more of the stack runs under HIFI directly instead of through partners.
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Hiring in New York and a small number of international markets.
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And pushing the product out from payments into cards and capital markets, where Walsh says the unsolved problems, especially around custody and control, are both the hardest and the most valuable ones to solve.
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Miller of Left Lane said in the release, quote, quote, "The growth HIFI has demonstrated reflects both the strength of the team and the speed at which stablecoins have become a core part of global financial infrastructure." Walsh told AlleyWatch that growth and the team were the two main things that got investors to write the check.
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He also told AlleyWatch, quote, "We have our work cut out for us.
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This is still early in the first quarter, we have lots of competition out to take our lunch." End quote. On the market, stablecoins are having a moment, as we've talked about endlessly on the tech brewery ride home.
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As anyone who's been paying attention lately knows.
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The Block's data has the total supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins above $295 billion right now, with Tether's USDT at about $183 billion of that and Circle's USDC at close to $76 billion.
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Chainalysis says cross-border stablecoin flows rose 77.5% to about $220 billion in the 12 months ending in June, even while the broader crypto market shrank by more than a third.
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So that growth is not crypto speculation, it's businesses moving money.
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And the GENIUS Act gave payment stablecoins a federal legal framework in July of last year, which matters a lot to the kind of institutions Hi -Fi once as customers. Visa's own numbers point in the same Stablecoin settlement across its network is past a $20 billion annualized run rate, with more than 15 times what it was a year ago, and there are more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs live, with volume through those programs up close to 200% % year over year.
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Citi is projecting and you can take long -range projections however you like, that the stablecoin market could hit 1 .9 trillion by 2030 and underpin something like $100 trillion a year in onchain settlement, with roughly 3% % of the U.S. equity market tokenized by the end of the decade.
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Visa's own survey this week found 56% % of U.S.
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adults would use stablecoins if they came with bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance. Without those protections, it drops to 36%.
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So the demand for this stuff, at least among regular people, is really demand for it to feel like a bank.
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Which is sort of the whole reason companies like HIFI exist in the first place. The name on the SEC filing is HIFI Bridge, Inc., and I couldn't help noticing that, because the biggest competitor in this exact category is a company called Bridge, the one Stripe bought back in 2024 for about a billion dollars. Stripe's Bridge doing basically the same thing on the payment side, stablecoin orchestration APIs for businesses that want to move dollars on and off chain without becoming crypto companies themselves. And Stripe has distribution HIFI can only dream about right now. Then there's Circle, which is both a partner, through the Circle Payments Network, and, I'd argue, a potential competitor, since Circle would presumably love to own more of the settlement layer around USDC.
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Add in BVNK, Zerohash, Fireblocks on the institutional side, plus the big banks and Visa building their own tokenization stacks, it's a crowded field. Walsh knows that, which is why he told AlleyWatch people are out to take his lunch. So where does HIFI actually stand apart?
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I think it's the capital markets piece.
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Most of the stablecoin payment companies are fighting over cross-border payouts, which is a good business, but probably a race to the bottom on fees eventually. Being in the DTCC production trades alongside BlackRock and Goldman, and settling the cash leg of a live repo trade on Canton, puts HIFI in a much smaller room.
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If tokenized Treasuries and repo actually take off, and DTCC launching its own tokenization service in October suggests the incumbents think it will,
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then somebody has to provide the dollars on the other side of those trades at three in the morning on a Sunday.
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a less crowded problem than payouts and probably a stickier one because once you're wired into a bank's collateral workflows, you don't get ripped out easily. The licenses are the first risk -eyed flag.
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though. HIFI is spending part of this round to get more of the stack under its own regulatory roof, which is smart, but it's also slow and expensive, and it's exactly the kind of thing a Stripe or a Circle can do faster with more money. Second, the volume number.
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$7 billion dollars annualized is founder-reported, and the Polygon figure in VentureBurn is a lot smaller, so I'd want to understand what's actually flowing through HIFI's own rails versus what they're routing through partners. And third, thing that always hangs over this category the banks and the networks could just do this themselves.
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Visa is partnering with HIFI today, and Visa is also building its own stablecoin settlement at a $20 billion dollar run rate.
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Partners have a way of turning into competitors and payments they always have. a first price round of $37 million, two years in, with Sumitomo already on the platform, is a real signal.
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If money really is becoming software, like Walsh says, somebody's gotta build the boring middle layer that makes it all work, and HIFI is at least in that conversation right now.
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That's it for this episode. Like and subscribe.
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And if you'd like your Startup on this show have your founding team get in touch and we'll jump on a video podcast recording for 45 minutes or so.
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I'll interview them and they can launch their legend in their own words.