Exclusive: Former Stripe and Coinbase employees raise $8 million for Latitude, a startup whose core product is stablecoin-based ‘Global Payouts’
When a business sends money internationally, the process can be slow and expensive. This is the gap that Latitude aims to fill by helping firms make fast and affordable international payments by using stablecoin rails while abstracting away the complexity.
On Tuesday, Latitude announced that it raised $8 million in a round led by NEA with participation from Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase, Paxos, and Solana Foundation, among others. Cyril Mathew, the startup’s CEO, did not disclose the company’s valuation in an interview with Fortune.
“We really want to make global payments simple for everybody and enable small businesses to reach everyone in the world,” said Vivek Morzaria, who started Latitude along with co-founders Brian Wrightson, and Mathew.
Latitude’s main product is what it calls Global Payouts, which allows U.S. businesses to make payments to individuals in over 50 countries. When an American firm sends U.S. dollars through Latitude, the startup’s network converts that money into stablecoins and then converts them back into the local currency of the destination. One of Latitude’s clients is Zencastr, a content creator company that has podcasters around the world. Through Latitude’s network, this company can pay its content creators in India and in other countries.
The startup’s second product serves more crypto-native apps or platforms that want to offer stablecoin access to international users. For example, if a prediction market company wants to expand internationally to, say Mexico or the Philippines, its users could convert local currency into stablecoins through Latitude’s infrastructure.
The three co-founders have worked at companies like Uber, Coinbase, Meta, and Stripe. They say that this experience in crypto, tech, and payments has taught them the importance of moving money efficiently around the world.
Latitude is currently in a beta launch, where it generates revenue through transaction fees. The company has 11 employees.
Mathew says that Latitude’s competition is traditional banks who facilitate foreign exchange transactions through legacy rails like Swift. The startup says that it has newer, more efficient rails than these institutions.
Small businesses are “paying too much and getting too little” from the incumbent system, Morzaria says.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com