Yellow Card secures $40M to link banks with stablecoin rails
DeFi & Yields ·
The stablecoin payments firm raised fresh strategic equity to widen its bank-facing infrastructure and challenge legacy cross-border settlement systems.
Yellow Card has closed a $40 million strategic equity round, pushing its cumulative equity funding past $120 million, according to CoinDesk. The new valuation sits well above the $200 million mark the company carried in 2022, though it remains under $1 billion, per a person familiar with the matter cited in the report. Backers in the round include SC Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital and Blockchain Capital.
The company's pitch centers on giving commercial banks a way to move dollars across borders using stablecoins and onchain settlement rather than relying solely on legacy messaging networks like Swift. Company leadership described a near-term shift where bank-to-bank payments settle directly onchain, cutting out intermediary payment processors entirely. That framing positions Yellow Card less as a consumer remittance tool and more as connective tissue between traditional banking rails and blockchain settlement layers.
Proceeds are earmarked for scaling Global USD Accounts, the firm's dollar-holding product for businesses, and for adding stablecoin and local payment rails in Latin America and Asia-Pacific. The accounts currently let businesses hold dollars, convert stablecoins, run treasury operations, and settle local currency payments through domestic rails spanning more than 50 countries.
Historically, transaction flow has been split close to evenly between corporate clients and large financial institutions, but bank-driven volume is now outpacing corporate volume as bigger institutions plug into the system. The company traces its roots to African markets, where it navigated country-by-country regulatory regimes before expanding; since founding in 2016 it has processed more than $10 billion in transactions and now holds licenses, authorizations or registrations across 22 jurisdictions.
The competitive backdrop includes Swift itself, which processes over 53 million messaging instructions daily for nearly 11,500 institutions and disclosed last month that it is testing a blockchain ledger of its own. Left unconfirmed is the precise post-money valuation from this round, which neither the company nor its leadership would verify. Also unresolved is how quickly bank adoption will scale relative to the corporate base, and whether the promised direct bank-to-bank onchain settlement model materializes at the pace described.