He heard the same sentence from a hundred crypto builders - "we want to give our community a card, but we can't spend six months integrating one" - and decided to make it a line of code.
Issuing a branded payment card used to be a project with a calendar attached to it. Pick a bank partner. Negotiate a BIN. Wrangle compliance officers in three jurisdictions. Wait two quarters. Michael Wu spent his early career as an engineer watching that kind of friction up close, and the company he started in 2019 exists to delete it. Interlace, his Singapore-based platform, now lets a business spin up cards through an API the way it spins up a database - and the meter on that idea reads more than six million cards issued.
That number is the headline, but it is not the whole story. Interlace runs a payment network reaching past 180 countries and regions, serves over 12,000 enterprise clients, and clears tens of millions of transactions a year. The plumbing underneath supports more than 40 fiat and crypto currencies - dollars and euros sitting alongside USDT and USDC - which is Wu's real wager: that stablecoins are quietly becoming the rails the next decade of cross-border money will ride on, and that whoever owns the boring infrastructure between crypto and the corner-store card reader owns something valuable.
Figures as stated by Interlace at Token2049 Singapore (Oct 2025) and in its Series B1 announcement (Dec 2024).
Walk into a Web3 startup in 2019 and you would find brilliant people who could ship a smart contract over a weekend, then stall for half a year trying to hand their users a piece of plastic that actually worked at a grocery checkout. Wu's pitch was almost rude in its simplicity: stop building that part. Plug into us instead. Interlace packaged the unglamorous machinery - bank relationships, card BINs, KYC and AML monitoring, PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance - into something a developer could call.
The framing he keeps returning to is "accounts + payments + card services + wealth management." It sounds like a bank's org chart, and that is the point. Interlace is assembling the same primitives a traditional financial institution offers, but stitched so that money can move between a crypto wallet and a fiat account without the user having to think about the seam. Wu describes stablecoins as the value bridge across that seam, and he has built the company so the bridge has tollbooths, guardrails, and a maintenance crew.
Stablecoins are becoming the value bridge connecting Web3 and traditional finance, and Interlace has built a comprehensive financial ecosystem based on accounts, payments, card services and wealth management.
Card issuing is the wedge, not the whole plan. With 30-plus card BIN resources behind it, Interlace can flex across use cases that look nothing alike on paper - a Web3 exchange paying contributors, an online travel agency settling with suppliers, an advertising platform reconciling spend, a company running global payroll. Each one is the same problem wearing a different costume: value needs to cross a currency, a system, and a border, fast and in compliance. Wu sells the connective tissue.
Before he was a fintech CEO speaking on conference panels about regulatory frameworks, Wu was the person writing the code. He studied at Stanford University and built software at companies that prize hard engineering - stints associated with Google and Dropcam, the home-camera startup whose technology later lived inside Google's Nest, plus work as a CTO and full-stack engineer at PalmDrive Inc. That pedigree matters to how Interlace is built: it is a payments company run by someone who thinks in systems and latency, not just spreadsheets and term sheets.
It also explains the product instinct. Founders who come up through banking tend to build features. Founders who come up through engineering tend to build interfaces - the clean line you draw between a messy reality and the developer who wants none of that mess. Interlace's Card-as-a-Service is that line drawn around an entire category of financial infrastructure.
Interlace's $10M Series B1 in December 2024 was led by Bitrock Capital. Bitrock's Alfred Shang said the team was "really impressed with Interlace's technological and product capabilities." Individual backers reportedly included alumni of Klarna and Robinhood - operators, not just check-writers.
Bars scaled for illustration, not to a common axis.
Engineering years: software work tied to Google and Dropcam, and a CTO / full-stack role at PalmDrive Inc. Stanford in the background. The pattern recognition starts here.
Founds Interlace in Singapore to make card issuance and digital-asset payments something enterprises can plug into rather than build.
Closes a $10M Series B1 led by Bitrock Capital and expands the leadership team - four senior hires across financial partnerships, operations, marketing and brand - to "accelerate global growth."
Debuts at Token2049 Dubai, pushing Card-as-a-Service for the PayFi sector and courting the Middle East's Web3 capital.
At Token2049 Singapore, announces issuance past 6 million cards across 12,000+ clients, and speaks on stablecoin-compliant payments at the Stablecoins & RWA Strategy Forum.
The Middle East is rapidly evolving from an energy stronghold into a center of digital innovation. Its open regulatory approach and dynamic capital environment make it a strategic region for Web3 transformation.
There is a temptation, in crypto, to make everything sound like a revolution. Wu's company does the opposite. The exciting word in his vocabulary is "compliance." Interlace leans on PCI-DSS Level 1 certification, AML and KYC monitoring, and multi-region licensing the way a bridge engineer leans on load tables. In a sector where the graveyard is full of fast-moving payment startups that skipped the regulatory homework, choosing to be the careful one is itself a strategy.
The 30-plus card BIN resources are the clearest tell. A BIN - the bank identification number that opens a card program - is hard to get and harder to get many of. Stockpiling them is unglamorous capital allocation. It is also exactly what lets Interlace say yes across wildly different customers and geographies without rebuilding from scratch each time. Wu is, in effect, hoarding the dull permissions that everyone else finds tedious, and renting them out as a service.
Then there is the stablecoin thesis, which is where the engineer's pragmatism meets a genuine market bet. Wu does not pitch stablecoins as ideology. He pitches them as logistics: a way for value to move between crypto-native treasuries and the fiat economy without sitting in transit for days. By supporting 40-plus currencies including USDT and USDC and making the fiat-crypto exchange seamless inside enterprise accounts, Interlace positions itself as the place that conversion quietly happens - on demand, in compliance, at the moment a card is swiped or a payroll run executes.
Interlace has wrapped much of this in the industry's newer shorthand, "PayFi" - payment-flavored DeFi, roughly - and showcased real-time "on-chain to off-chain" transactions at conferences from Dubai to Singapore. Strip the jargon and the demo is almost mundane in the best way: money that lives on a blockchain, spent at a normal terminal, settled correctly. The mundanity is the achievement.
Before payments, Wu helped build software at Dropcam - the home-camera startup later folded into Google's Nest. A founder who once shipped consumer hardware tends to respect how hard "it just works" actually is.
"Accounts + payments + card services + wealth management" is, almost word for word, a retail bank's product list. Interlace assembles it from API parts - the unbundled bank, re-bundled for crypto-era enterprises.
The company calls Singapore home - a deliberate choice in one of the world's most license-friendly fintech hubs - while Wu's own trail runs back through Stanford and Silicon Valley engineering.
The endgame Wu describes is a strange one for a founder: he wants you to never notice his company. The best infrastructure disappears. If Interlace works, a Web3 community gives its members a card and nobody spends six months on it; a business moves money across four borders and three currencies and it feels like sending an email; a stablecoin becomes spendable without a single person thinking the word "stablecoin." Wu's quotes circle this idea again and again - the bridge, the value flow, the seamless exchange - and they all point at the same destination: finance that just works, underneath, where you cannot see it.
Six million cards in, with a fresh round of capital and a leadership bench stocked with operators from the fintech and brand worlds, the question is no longer whether the idea works. It is how big the dull, essential layer he is building can get before someone notices it was the important part all along.
Profile compiled from public sources: company press releases, Token2049 coverage, Crunchbase and The Org. Figures are as stated by Interlace. Where the record is thin, the page stays quiet rather than guesses.