The card behind the cards you actually use.

Who they are now

Somewhere right now, a freelancer in Manila is buying lunch with a card branded by a company they have never heard of, funded by stablecoins that never touched a bank branch. The transaction clears in a second. Nobody thinks twice. That invisibility is the whole point - and it belongs to Interlace.

Interlace is a Singapore-based fintech that issues physical and virtual cards on behalf of other businesses. It is not a bank you bank with. It is the layer underneath the apps that act like banks. Connect to its API, pick from 30-plus card BINs, and a crypto exchange, travel platform or AI startup can launch a branded card program in about two weeks - the kind of project that used to take a year and a legal team.

By late 2025 the company had issued more than six million cards, served over 12,000 enterprise clients, and built a payment network spanning 180-plus countries. For a firm most fintech-watchers cannot name, those are loud numbers spoken very quietly.

The problem they saw

Money learned to move on-chain. Spending it did not.

Here is the awkward truth crypto spent years not saying out loud: you could hold a fortune in stablecoins and still struggle to buy a coffee. On-chain assets were fast, global and programmable. Off-chain spending was none of those things. Between the two sat a wall of card networks, banking licenses, compliance regimes and acronyms - PCI, AML, KYC, BIN - that most companies had neither the patience nor the permission to climb.

The result was a gap. Businesses sitting on digital assets wanted to let customers and employees actually use them in the physical economy. Traditional issuers were slow, expensive, and allergic to anything with the word "crypto" attached. The bridge everyone wanted was the bridge nobody wanted to build, because building it meant doing the least fashionable work in finance: getting licensed.

The founders' bet

Build the boring part first.

Michael Wu founded Interlace in 2019, and the bet was contrarian for its moment. While much of the industry chased tokens and trading volume, Interlace chased licenses and certifications - the slow, expensive credentials that take years and rarely make headlines.

That patience produced a rare credential: Interlace became a Principal Member of Visa in Hong Kong, giving it direct issuing rights inside one of the world's largest clearing networks. It stacked up PCI-DSS Level 1 certification and financial licenses across the United States, Hong Kong and Lithuania. The wager was simple. Compliance is a moat. The companies that did the unglamorous regulatory homework early would be the ones still standing when the rules caught up with the hype.

In December 2024 the market agreed. Interlace raised a $10 million Series B1 led by Bitrock Capital, with backing from individual investors who had built things at Klarna and Robinhood. The company used the round to expand its leadership team and push into APAC, the US and the UK.

The product

One API. A stack of things that used to need a bank.

Interlace packages the hard parts of finance into modules a developer can call. The headline is Card-as-a-Service: branded physical and virtual cards, white-labeled, issued through a single integration. Around it sits a fuller stack - the kind of thing that, not long ago, would have required several vendors, a banking partner, and a great deal of optimism.

The proof

Numbers that grew while no one was watching.

Between its Series B1 announcement and Token2049 Singapore - roughly ten months - Interlace's card count climbed from 4.5 million to over 6 million. Its enterprise client base reached 12,000-plus. The network now reaches more than 180 countries and supports over 40 fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, processing upward of 60 million transactions a year.

It also kept signing partners. A tie-up with custody firm Cobo reinforced its stablecoin payments infrastructure, and its Visa membership keeps the cards landing on real terminals. The customers are not retail consumers; they are Web3 companies, crypto exchanges, OTA travel platforms, AI startups and cross-border traders who want financial features without becoming a financial institution themselves.

The mission

A bridge between two kinds of money.

Interlace describes its job plainly: deliver efficient cross-border, cross-currency financial solutions for Web3, e-commerce, B2B trade and developers. Less plainly, it wants to be the place where on-chain assets become off-chain spending - where the value sitting in a wallet can leave through a card without anyone needing a finance degree to make it happen.

Its team frames the hard part honestly. "Balancing compliance and user experience is a common challenge in the industry," says Henry Chan, who leads compliance and operations. That tension - keep regulators comfortable, keep users uninterrupted - is the line Interlace walks for a living.

Why it matters tomorrow

If stablecoins go mainstream, someone has to make them spendable.

Stablecoins are creeping from crypto-native niche toward everyday settlement. As they do, the bottleneck moves from holding value to using it. The winners will not necessarily be the loudest brands; they will be the rails that quietly clear transactions in 180 countries while staying on the right side of every regulator in the room.

Interlace is not a sure thing. It competes with Marqeta, Stripe Issuing and a growing field of crypto-to-card challengers, and it operates in a category where rules can change faster than products. But it made an early, unfashionable bet that compliance and infrastructure would matter more than narrative. So far, six million cards say the bet is paying off.

Go back to that freelancer in Manila, mid-bite, card in hand. They will never read Interlace's name on the front of it. That is not a marketing failure. For a company built to disappear into other people's products, it is the closest thing to a finished job.