A payments founder who bet on the markets everyone else skipped
Maggie Wu spends her days on a problem most people never think about: how money actually crosses a border. Not the app that shows a balance, but the plumbing underneath - the wires, the waiting, the fees that pile up when a business in Mexico pays a supplier in Singapore. As CEO and co-founder of VelaFi, she is trying to replace that plumbing with stablecoins, and she has convinced a roster of global investors to fund the attempt.
VelaFi launched on July 1, 2025 as the standalone evolution of TruBit Business, the enterprise arm of Wu's company Galactic Holdings. In January 2026 it raised a $20 million Series B led by XVC and Ikuyo, with participation from Alibaba Investment, Planetree and existing backer BAI Capital. The round pushed total funding across her ventures past $40 million and set the stage for expansion out of Latin America and into the United States and Asia.
The pitch is straightforward. VelaFi connects local banking rails, cross-border networks and major stablecoin protocols so that companies can move funds between markets faster and cheaper than the traditional system allows. Wu puts numbers on it: transfers that settle in under 30 minutes, fees under 1%, and payment costs cut by roughly 70% compared with legacy methods. The platform now serves more than 500 institutional clients and has processed billions in volume.
What makes the story interesting is where it started. When Wu founded Galactic Holdings in 2020, she did it in Mexico, not Silicon Valley. She saw a region with a fast-growing economy and an underdeveloped financial system, and she treated that gap as an opportunity rather than a risk. The consumer platform she built there, TruBit, grew to more than 300,000 users across Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and beyond, with products including a wallet, a trading platform, stablecoin services, a SPEI integration into Mexico's real-time payment system, and Mastercard prepaid cards.
"The entire financial system in Latin America is relatively underdeveloped," she has said, "but the market's economic growth is actually very rapid." That combination - real demand, thin infrastructure - is exactly the setting where a new payment rail can take hold.
From engineering student to international trade to crypto
Wu was born in China and moved to the United States more than 18 years ago. She was already working before most of her classmates had thought about careers. "I knew what I wanted very early and was willing to give 100% of my effort for it," she has said of her college years, when she interned at companies while others enjoyed campus life. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Master of Science from the National University of Singapore.
Her first chapter after graduation was international trade in the United States, where she says she earned her "first pot of gold." Crypto came later. In 2016 she began buying Bitcoin, and the deeper she read into the technology, the more convinced she became. In 2018 she took a blockchain course through MIT Sloan Executive Education. By 2017 she had already co-founded Krypital Group, a digital-asset investment fund, and through it and Crypto Group she went on to invest in more than 100 projects worldwide, spanning infrastructure to applications.
A trip to Latin America turned an investor into an operator. Recognizing the opportunity for crypto finance in the region, Wu set up Galactic Holdings and launched TruBit, then spent the next several years building it into a licensed, multi-country platform. In 2025 she carved out the business-to-business layer and rebranded it as VelaFi, betting that the bigger prize was infrastructure, not consumer trading.
That framing matters to how she runs the company. Wu is careful to describe banks as partners, not targets. VelaFi sits between them, handling the movement of value while the banks keep the customer relationships. It is a less combative story than most crypto pitches, and a more durable one - the kind of positioning that tends to survive regulatory scrutiny rather than invite it.
Scrutiny is something Wu seems to plan for rather than dodge. She has said plainly that regulations "should be fair and applicable to all," and she has drawn hard lines in her own operations. She refuses to list high-risk tokens, and she leans on legal and compliance expertise to steer clear of the failures that have taken down other crypto companies. In an industry that has spent years apologizing for blowups, a regulation-first posture is less a constraint than a competitive edge.
Why businesses are settling in stablecoins
The clearest read on VelaFi's traction is in what its customers actually use. About 90% of clients settle in USDT, with USDC adoption rising and little demand for anything else. That concentration says something about where enterprise trust currently sits - businesses want the stablecoin they know will be liquid when they need to convert it, and they are willing to route real payment volume through it.
Wu's near-term map points east and north. "Our strategic focus is on the U.S. and Asia," she has said, describing the Latin American business as having reached "a relatively mature and stable phase." VelaFi now runs across Latin America, the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore, and the Series B is fuel for pushing further into those regulated markets.
It is a lot of ground for one founder to cover - an engineering degree, a career in trade, a hundred-plus crypto investments, a consumer platform in one hemisphere and an infrastructure company spanning three continents. But the through-line is consistent. Wu keeps looking for the places where the money system is slow, expensive or missing, and she keeps building the connective tissue to fix it. Her personal motto, translated roughly, is that every step has value. The career suggests she means it.