Exclusive: Crypto startup ZBD raises $40 million to power video game payments

Gamers have long bought and sold digital items like swords, jewels, and spaceship parts. Cryptocurrencies, which are inherently digital, seem like an obvious tie-in. In a bid to make good on that combination and build blockchain payments rails for video games, the Bitcoin payments startup ZBD has raised $40 million in a Series C fundraise.

Based in New Jersey, the company sells access to video game payments software that can process a variety of transactions, including Bitcoin ones. Blockstream Capital, a crypto investment firm connected to early Bitcoiner Adam Back, led ZBD’s most recent funding round and put in $36 million, Simon Cowell, the startup’s cofounder and CEO, told Fortune. He declined to name the other investors and at what valuation ZBD raised its most recent round.

“We’re talking about a payment solution for the entire industry that actually really enables them to have a direct financial relationship to the player,” Cowell added.

Zebedee

ZBD’s fundraise comes amid a climate of growing pessimism regarding the integration of crypto into video games. Long hailed as one of blockchain’s most obvious use cases, the combination hasn’t achieved the same mainstream adoption that boosters promised during crypto’s bull cycle in 2021 and 2022, when advocates said that NFTs were a clear evolution of in-game collectibles.

ZBD, though, has never been in the business of NFTs or crypto-based gameplay, and the startup is piggybacking off a crypto use case that has seen adoption: payments. Especially with the rise of stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, blockchains as payments rails have become a talking point from big fintechs like Stripe and even big banks like JPMorgan Chase.

It’s apt, then, that Cowell’s background is in financial services, not games. Spending most of his career in asset management, he began working in 2016 for NXMH, a family office that would eventually acquire the crypto exchange Bitstamp. Three years later, the U.K.-native Cowell decided to team up with his other cofounders André Neves and Christian Moss to launch ZBD–named after a character called Zebedee from a French cartoon show. “It didn’t really mean anything,” Cowell said of the company’s name, adding that they just liked the sound of it.

Rather than stablecoins, the trio focused on Bitcoin and built a company that lets games pay out users in the world’s largest cryptocurrency. But ZBD’s chief strategy officer, Ben Cousens, stressed that crypto payouts aren’t the company’s only area of expertise. Instead of relying on fintechs like Stripe, developers can integrate ZBD’s tech to let gamers more directly send money to each other as well as earn loyalty rewards for repeatedly loading up a video game, he added. “You retain that user because you don’t need to send them out to a third party, because we’re providing the rails,” said Cousens.

While ZBD’s cofounder Cowell said the startup wasn’t yet profitable and declined to disclose revenue figures, he did say they’ve achieved traction among mobile game developers. The startup of 70 employees worked with 55 games in 2025, he said. And the $40 million the team raised will help it roll out a broader suite of payments products over the next year. “Where we’re moving to is expanding into a more fulsome payment suite,” said Cowell.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com