Conduit, a cross-border payments platform powered by stablecoins, announced it closed a $36 million Series A funding round.
The funding round was co-led by Dragonfly and Altos Ventures, “with participation from Sound Ventures, Commerce Ventures, DCG, Circle Ventures (the issuer of the USDC stablecoin) and existing investors Helios Digital Ventures, and Portage Ventures.”
Conduit’s cross-border payment network “integrates stablecoins, USD and local currencies, providing businesses with a faster, cheaper, and more reliable alternative to the legacy SWIFT system.”
Already connected into multiple local banks across North America, Latin America, Europe, other regions, Conduit will “use the capital to fuel expansion into additional markets and support an even broader range of traditional and digital currencies through its real-time payment rails.”
This round of funding comes on the back of Conduit’s growth, with transaction volumes “growing 16x through its platform between 2023 and 2024.”
To date, Conduit has saved clients “over 60,000 hours in settlement times and generated fee savings worth over $55 million.”
The platform bridges crypto-native infrastructure “with traditional finance, offering nearly instant, programmable global transactions with integrated AML, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring.”
Clients choose Conduit for:
- Speed and Efficiency: Unlike payment platforms that rely on slow and disjointed networks of correspondent banks, Conduit has direct partnerships with two dozen banks across the world, enabling transactions to settle in seconds rather than days.
- Broad Geographic Coverage: Conduit natively supports a diverse range of currencies and payment methods, including highly inflationary local currencies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
- Liquidity: Conduit’s robust network of institutional-grade FX providers ensures large transactions can be processed seamlessly without liquidity constraints.
Kirill Gertman, Conduit CEO said:
“This fresh capital injection will enable us to accelerate our mission to build the next generation global payments infrastructure, to promote fairer economic opportunities across the world. Traditional cross-border payment systems do not meet the demands of modern businesses. Conduit’s platform seamlessly bridges the gap between traditional banking and stablecoin technology, offering unparalleled speed, affordability, transparency and reliability.”
Conduit’s platform enables “nearly instant global transfers across multiple payment rails, including USD-denominated payment networks (SWIFT, ACH, FedWire) and local payment systems throughout Europe, the UK, and countries such as China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Brazil, among others.”
Businesses in these regions often face “restricted access to USD, lack of SWIFT connectivity, limited interoperability between stablecoins and fiat currencies, slow settlement times, high fees, and complex regulatory requirements.”
While stablecoins can have a significant impact “on how businesses can manage their treasuries, most market participants still expect invoices to be settled in fiat currencies, creating a need for seamless interoperability between fiat and digital currencies.”
Conduit enables clients in those jurisdictions to transition “between stablecoins and local currencies in real-time to more efficiently settle commercial invoices.”
As part of this investment, Dragonfly Capital’s Rob Hadick will “join the Conduit board.”
By addressing the real pain points businesses face with international transactions, particularly in emerging markets, Conduit has “positioned itself as a critical infrastructure provider for the global economy.”
Founded in 2021, Conduit currently has “57 employees and serves more than 100 clients, experiencing 105% year-over-year client growth.”
The company plans to expand its product offering “into Asia, strengthen its footprint in Mexico, as well as other geographies.”