$17M
Series A
The Profile
Making million-dollar transfers move like a text message
Ian Krotinsky spends his days on a problem most people never think about until it stops them cold: how to move a very large amount of money from one country to another without it taking days and costing a fortune.
As co-founder and CEO of Fin, a New York company he started with fellow former Citadel employee Aashiq Dheeraj, Krotinsky is building what he calls the payments app of the future. The idea is direct. Stablecoins - digital dollars that settle in seconds - have quietly become good enough to carry real money. Fin wraps that infrastructure in an app simple enough that a user never has to think about the blockchain underneath. Money goes in, money comes out, and it lands anywhere in the world almost instantly.
The distinction that matters to Krotinsky is the size of the transfer. Consumer apps like Venmo and Zelle are built for splitting dinner or paying rent, and they cap out well before the sums Fin cares about. Fin is aimed at the transfers that still run through banks and wire desks: hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, moving between businesses, institutions and individuals. That is the slow, expensive corner of finance Krotinsky wants to take.
We're building an app that takes advantage of all the benefits of stablecoins without all the complexity, and it's going to work anywhere in the world.
- Ian Krotinsky, to Fortune
The company did not begin with that grand a mission. Its first product was TipLink, a tool that let people send crypto or an NFT with nothing more than a link - no wallet address, no seed phrase, no friction. It was backed by Sequoia and it worked, but it was a narrow slice of a much larger opportunity. As Krotinsky and his team watched how people actually tried to move money, the ambition grew. In late 2025 the company rebranded to Fin and reset its sights on payments at large.
The Origin
A side project that exposed a broken system
The seed of the company was planted on nights and weekends while both founders were still at Citadel. One of their hacking projects was a Reddit-style platform that paid users 50 dollars for landing a post on the front page. Simple enough, until they tried to actually send that money to people scattered around the world. It turned out to be surprisingly, frustratingly hard. The internet could move an idea to anyone instantly; money crawled.
That gap between how fast information travels and how slowly money does became the thesis for the whole company. Krotinsky frames the competitive landscape around a structural weakness of the incumbents rather than any single feature.
It's difficult for incumbents to rip out their whole infrastructure and build a proper payments product in the new global stablecoin regime. That difficulty is our opportunity.
- Ian Krotinsky, on Fin's edge
The Background
From the trading desk to the founder's chair
Krotinsky's path to payments ran through some of the most demanding rooms in finance. He studied at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, then went to Goldman Sachs as a program trader. In 2016 he joined Citadel, where he spent six years as a quantitative portfolio manager and trader before leaving to build full time. That background shows up in how Fin is built: a bias toward systems that are fast, reliable and measured in the details, applied to a consumer-facing product.
It also shows up in who he hired. The founding team pulled talent from Google, Meta, Uber, Rippling and Chime - people who have shipped products used by millions. Fin's investors point to that combination as the reason they wrote checks. As Pantera's Ryan Barney put it, the team has repeatedly shown it can build crypto products that don't feel like crypto: simple, intuitive, and ready for real-world users.
Fin is built as the payments app of the future.
This team can build crypto products that don't feel like crypto - simple, intuitive, ready for real users. - Ryan Barney, Pantera
The Round
$17 million to move real money
In December 2025, Fin announced a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating. The money is pointed at launching the stablecoin product for high-value payments, starting with a pilot aimed at import and export businesses - companies that move large sums across borders constantly and feel the pain of slow, opaque wires more than most. Total reported funding for the company sits at roughly $29.5 million.
The business model has two engines. Fin plans to charge transaction fees that undercut traditional wires, and it plans to earn interest on the stablecoin balances sitting in user wallets. It is a model that only becomes possible once the underlying rails are digital, which is precisely the shift Krotinsky is betting has finally arrived.
For all the ambition, Krotinsky's public posture is grounded. The company is starting with a specific, unglamorous market and a working pilot rather than sweeping promises. The vision is to challenge the banks; the near-term plan is to get one hard kind of transfer right and expand from there.