Infrastructure businesses are rarely built at the moment a technology is invented. They are built at the moment it becomes ordinary and a novel capability stops being an experiment and starts being something a business expects to work. Stablecoins are starting to cross that line - and the infrastructure is starting to follow. The licenses, the local bank connections, the liquidity, the compliance apparatus required to move value between a stablecoin and the currency a person actually spends are emerging as the next clear frontier in need of development for stablecoins to truly become ubiquitous. That gap is where the durable company gets built. Today we are proud to announce that Oak HC/FT is leading a $35 million Series A in Latitude, the global payments infrastructure company connecting stablecoin settlement to local payment rails worldwide.
The case for stablecoins as a settlement layer no longer requires argument. More than $300 billion is in circulation, transfer volumes have surpassed the combined annual throughput of Visa and Mastercard, and regulatory frameworks, including GENIUS in the United States, MiCA in Europe, established regimes across Asia, have moved the asset class from tolerated to supervised. Stripe's $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge and Mastercard's $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK settled any remaining debate about strategic value.
But the volume that has migrated onto these rails so far is a rounding error against the $195 trillion cross-border payments market. The constraint is not belief or market opportunity, it is the plumbing.
Consider what actually happens when a marketplace in San Francisco pays a seller in São Paulo. The money leaves on correspondent banking rails designed in the 1970s, passes through three or four intermediaries, takes two to five business days to settle, and arrives having lost an unadvertised amount to an FX spread that no one on either end can independently verify. Every additional country that marketplace enters means another banking relationship, another licensing analysis, another provider, and another reconciliation process. Companies that can acquire users anywhere in the world still cannot pay them without rebuilding their payments stack market by market.
Stablecoins solve the middle of that journey. They do almost nothing for the last mile of it, though. A contractor in Manila does not want USDC. They want pesos in the account they already have. The on- and off-ramps that translate between the two are, outside the United States, either missing entirely or slow and expensive where they exist. This is the last mile of global money movement, and it is where the economics and the difficulty both concentrate.
Latitude is building that last mile at global scale.
The company’s platform gives businesses a single API to move money into and out of any market it serves. Stablecoins handle settlement and local rails handle delivery. Funds arrive in local currency, in the payment method the recipient already uses, in seconds rather than days. Pricing is transparent and benchmarked to verifiable interbank FX rates rather than buried in a spread. Onboarding takes days, not the months that regulated payment integrations have historically required. The recipient never needs a wallet, a seed phrase, or an opinion about stablecoins.
What convinced us was not the product surface. It was what sits underneath it, and the order in which Latitude chose to build.
Most entrants in this category rented their regulatory posture. They launched on a sponsor bank's license, wrapped a white-label provider, and optimized for time to first transaction. It is the faster path, and it produces a business whose cost structure, compliance perimeter, and coverage map all belong to somebody else. Latitude inverted the sequence. Before writing a line of go-to-market strategy, the team spent its first year securing its own money transmitter licenses, ultimately reaching licensed or approved status across 45 U.S. markets in roughly eight months, faster than competitors many times its size. With these, they have established direct FBO banking relationships, and are building an AI-native compliance stack capable of automated screening and onboarding at global scale.
That choice looks conservative for about a year and then compounds. Owning the licenses is what makes two-day onboarding possible rather than a two-month legal exercise. Owning the compliance program is what makes Latitude usable by regulated institutions and large enterprises that will not touch a workaround. And building direct connections into local banks, rather than routing through layers of intermediaries, is what produces both the coverage and the cost structure that competitors relying on third-party rails structurally cannot match.
The timing also matters more than it usually does. The two companies that defined this category are now owned by Stripe and Mastercard. Both are excellent businesses that defined the space and accelerated the adoption, but market adoption is still in very early innings. More and more companies, are launching day 1 global products and build on top of stablecoins to provide global-by-default capabilities. Large enterprises are now adopting stablecoin infrastructure to expand globally, improve their treasury operations, improve customer experience, or optimize cost structure. These larger players are increasingly looking to trusted, regulated and neutral partners to provide the best coverage, cost and speed across types of stablecoins, blockchains, and geographies. These are the core primitives Latitude is building around.
Exceptional infrastructure requires founders who have built it before and know precisely which parts are hard. Latitude's founding team has spent the last decade at the center of both halves of this problem. Co-founder and CEO Cyril Mathew was previously President and COO of ZeroHash, launched Stripe's crypto business, led the USDC business at Coinbase, and before that led international payments partnerships at Uber. These resumes are nearly exact maps of the problem Latitude is solving, and it comes with the relationships across banks, issuers, and regulators that this business cannot be built without. In a category where the product is fundamentally a network, Cyril's ability to convene one is the single highest-leverage asset the company has. He is also, by the consistent account of everyone who has worked with him, a magnet for talent. Co-founder and CTO Brian Wrightson spent four years at Stripe building enterprise payments and core infrastructure, and has assembled an engineering team that includes an architect of Coinbase's early money movement systems. Co-founder and Head of GTM Vivek Morzaria brings operating experience from Uber, OpenSea and ZeroHash.
We have known Cyril and team since before Latitude existed and have tracked the company since its founding. We led this round because we believe the winners in stablecoin infrastructure will be decided by who does the patient, expensive, deeply unfashionable work of connecting those rails to regulated local financial systems globally. And, by those who are trusted enough to be allowed to.
We are proud to partner with Cyril, Brian, Vivek, and the entire team as they scale it.
