At Oak HC/FT, we look for companies solving structural gaps in the market. In the current landscape, money moves in real time, but the visibility required to understand that movement, including where a transaction went, who authorized it, and whether the records agree, still depends on fragmented, manual reporting. Connective tissue that lets institutions see across systems that were never designed to talk to each other needs to exist before AI can be deployed responsibly, particularly in a regulated environment like financial services.
We are pleased to announce our co-leadership of Cordant’s $8 million seed round, a company setting out to build exactly this connection layer. Alongside this round, Cordant is emerging from stealth and announcing an initial cohort of 11 design partners, including industry leaders like Bitso and Paxos, to address the fragmentation inherent in modern financial infrastructure. This launch represents a critical milestone in providing the ground truth and unified observability necessary for institutions to safely deploy AI and scale multi-rail operations within highly regulated environments.
Solving for the "Seams"
The core insight that drew us to Cordant is that a failure almost never happens inside a single system. Instead, it happens in the seams between them, like in the handoffs between banks, processors, ledgers, and compliance tools where no single product is looking for errors. Point solutions have historically missed this, only offering visibility into their own narrow slice of the transaction lifecycle and missing the context of the handsoffs. Particularly when that context needs not just regulatory information, but also specific company norms.
Cordant is built on the belief that when underlying systems multiply, a new layer must emerge above them to coordinate the complexity. Similar to how cloud layers emerged to coordinate disconnected data centers, Cordant serves as a horizontal certainty layer. It ingests, normalizes, and contextualizes signals from existing systems to create a shared operational reality without requiring institutions to replace their core infrastructure or move their funds. It helps companies improve their real-time decision making and helps capture their specific governing logic so that they can operate according to plan. Cordant also aims to solve real pain points that extend beyond operational efficiency into compliance, risk management and capital efficiency. Coordination across these functions is now more important than ever as new payment rails are global by default.
The Team That Lived the Problem
We were convinced not just by the vision, but by the team’s unparalleled experience. Cordant was founded by several former leaders from Rapyd, including Eric Rosenthal, Lior Levitt, Sagi Ittah and Juan Jose Huezo, who helped scale that platform to over $1 billion in revenue across 50+ countries.
While building one of the world’s largest fintech infrastructure platforms at Rapyd they experienced multi-rail global payments complexity first hand and are solving the exact problem they lived through. They understand that at global scale, operational fragmentation becomes the primary constraint on growth. Their background gives them the unique credibility to build the neutral, trusted coordination layer the industry desperately needs.
The Foundation for the Agentic Era
As we enter the era of AI and agentic workflows, the need for Cordant becomes even more urgent. Everyone wants to deploy AI into payments and back-office workflows, but institutions cannot automate responsibly if they cannot see or explain the process. AI without context produces noise, and AI confined to a single system cannot solve the highest-value problems in finance, which inherently cross functional boundaries. By mapping all activity into a consistent, real-time structure with explicit business logic, Cordant creates the governed context and control layer necessary to run AI inside regulated environments safely and defensibly.
What ultimately confirmed our thesis was the diversity of Cordant’s design partners, including industry leaders like Bitso, Multimoney, OpenReserve, Paxos, Surus and Transcard. Whether it is a bank managing partner economies, a PSP reconciling a wallet, or a crypto-native operator working across chains, they are all facing the same fundamental struggle. Everyone needs to reconstruct a coherent picture from systems that don't talk to each other.
Cordant is the mission control that allows these businesses to grow at the pace of their ambition, rather than the pace of their proof. By closing the gap between the business an institution is running and the business their systems think they are running, Cordant is building the connective fabric for the next decade of finance. We’re honored to be partnering with Eric and team on this new project.
