Moving Money, Minus the Wait
Kirill Gertman runs Conduit, a New York fintech that has quietly become one of the more consequential experiments in how businesses move money between countries. The pitch is simple to state and hard to build: take a payment in one local currency, convert it to a stablecoin - a digital token pegged to the U.S. dollar - carry it across borders in minutes, and pay out in another local currency on the other side. Customers rarely touch the crypto layer at all. To them, a supplier in Nairobi or Mexico City just gets paid.
That model, sometimes described as the "stablecoin sandwich," now processes more than $10 billion in annualized volume. Conduit works with over 20 banks across nine countries, supports 14 fiat currencies, and serves more than 5,000 merchants alongside 100-plus fintech platforms that have embedded its rails into their own products. In May 2025 the company raised a $36 million Series A co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Altos Ventures, with Sound Ventures, DCG and Commerce Ventures joining. Public reporting puts total funding around $53 million.
Gertman frames the value plainly. "Essentially, our service is the one-stop-shop for going in and out of local currencies and stablecoins," he told Fortune. The moat, he argues, is not the technology so much as the relationships underneath it: "We have a network of over 20 banks across nine countries that we work with very closely that gives us the best access to local rails."
From DeFi Analytics to Payment Rails
Conduit did not start here. Gertman co-founded the company in 2021 as an API connecting fintechs and financial institutions with crypto-backed products, and its early work leaned toward analytics tools for institutional investors in decentralized finance. Then the crypto market cratered in 2022, and the assumptions underneath that first product went with it.
Rather than fold, Gertman spent more than a year hunting for a business that would hold up in any market. What he found was mundane by crypto standards and enormous by everyone else's: businesses in emerging markets could not move money in and out of the country without losing days and a meaningful cut to fees and friction. The insight that reframed the company, as he detailed on the F-Squared podcast, was that the primary barrier was not chasing yield - it was the sheer difficulty of on-ramping into digital dollars in the first place.
Conduit launched its cross-border payments service for Latin America in August 2023, then pushed into Africa - Kenya and Nigeria - by the end of that year. The traction was fast. Transaction volume grew 16x year on year, and by 2024 the company had crossed $10 billion in total volume and picked up a $6 million seed extension from Helios Digital Ventures.
A Product Person, Deep in Fintech
Gertman brings more than a dozen years of fintech behind the current run, split across startups and traditional banking. About six years ago he moved into crypto, where, by his own account, he "built applications used by millions of people to secure billions of dollars in value." He led product at BRD, a consumer crypto wallet later acquired by Coinbase, and served as Head of Product at Eco, a company that raised more than $86 million led by a16z Crypto.
His self-description on a speaker profile is telling in its lack of pretense - his listed credentials read simply, "Product, design, UX - all the things." The through-line across his roles is a product manager's instinct to start from a concrete user problem rather than a technology looking for a use. At Conduit that shows up as a stated mission to solve "real-world issues faced by traditional businesses that need a better, faster and more transparent way to transact."
Taking Aim at the Wire
Conduit's competition is not really other crypto startups - it is the incumbent machinery of correspondent banking and SWIFT, which can take days to settle an international payment and layers in cost at each hop. Gertman's argument is that stablecoins collapse that chain into something closer to instant, and that the businesses feeling the most pain are precisely the ones legacy rails serve worst: importers, exporters, payroll providers and platforms operating across emerging markets.
With the Series A closed, the company has signaled plans to expand into several Asian markets, adding to its footprint across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Kenya and Nigeria. Gertman has taken the story to stages including Money 20/20 USA and the Africa Fintech Summit, and to a steady rotation of fintech podcasts, where his message tends to be the same: the interesting part of stablecoins is not speculation, it is infrastructure that people never have to think about.
For a category that spent years chasing headlines, that is a deliberately unglamorous bet. It also happens to be the one moving ten figures of real payments a year.