cross-border-payments
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Corpay's $13 Billion Bet: Make Foreign Exchange Boring for Everyone Else
The Toronto payments operator stitched together decades-old FX firms, a global banking network and a very human service model. Mastercard's $300 million investment says the unglamorous plumbing may be the valuable part.
Wise Moves the Money, Arc Makes It Wait Better
Wise Business is built for money in motion across borders. Arc is built for venture-backed cash at rest, and a practical finance stack may use both.
The Ex-Coinbase Custody Boss Wants Your Business Bank Account to Run on Stablecoins
Dakota looks like a normal business bank account. Underneath, your dollars are stablecoins backed by Treasuries you actually control - and that quiet swap is the whole pitch.
The Chicago Startup That Wants to Make Waiting for Money Feel as Weird as Waiting for a Fax
Daniel Lev and Benjamin Meeder built a payment layer on stablecoins instead of the batch files banks still run on. Two years in, Pantera wrote a $25M check and revenue is up 23x.
The Australian Who Built a British Card-Killer - Then Sold It Back to Australia
Banked spent eight years trying to build a payments network cheaper than cards. In May 2026 National Australia Bank bought the whole thing - and pointed it at home.
The Checkout Button That Wants to Move the World’s Crypto
COINPAYMENTS began by making altcoins spendable. Now it is trying to become the quiet infrastructure beneath global commerce - from a WooCommerce cart to a private jet purchase.
REDLINE LAB Is Building the Missing Middle of Latin American Web3
From a Panama base, Soren Azorian's venture studio is assembling capital, code and cross-border infrastructure into one Web3 portfolio. The wager is that the region needs an operating system for founders, not another pitch competition.
How Razorpay Turned the 'Payment Failed' Screen Into a $7.5 Billion Business
It began because two engineers couldn't collect money online for a side project. A decade later Razorpay moves an estimated $180 billion a year for millions of Indian businesses - and is walking toward the public markets.
The Company Teaching Global Money to Speak 17 Local Languages
A single API, 17 Latin American countries, and 640-plus ways to move money. How a Buenos Aires payments company became the plumbing under global commerce - then got bought by an ad-tech giant.
PayPal Wants to Be the Internet's Cash Register Again
The blue button helped teach the web to pay. Now PayPal is stitching checkout, Venmo, Braintree, credit, ads and AI agents into a new wager on how money will move.
The checkout has 1,000 doors. Zota wants one key.
Cards are only one dialect in global commerce. Zota built a payment gateway for the hundreds of local wallets, bank transfers, QR systems and currencies that decide whether an international checkout succeeds.
Your Bill Pay Stack Wasn't Built for a Crowd
BILL, Stampli, Melio and AvidXchange can move vendor money across borders. Tipalti starts from a different problem: onboarding and paying a changing crowd of creators, affiliates and marketplace sellers at global scale.
The Checkout Counter Where Crypto Becomes Ordinary Money
BitPay spent 15 years making one volatile idea feel routine: a customer pays from a crypto wallet, while the merchant can wake up to ordinary money in the bank.
Bitcoin’s Fast Lane Is Getting a Finance Department
Voltage began by putting Lightning nodes in the cloud. Now it is selling something more ambitious: instant payment rails that engineers can call by API and finance teams can settle in dollars.
Stellar Development Foundation
The nonprofit behind Stellar wants to make moving money across borders as cheap as sending an email - and it has convinced MoneyGram, PayPal, and Franklin Templeton to help prove it.
Ripple
Ripple has spent more than a decade trying to make money move like information. Its latest act is bigger than payments: a regulated institutional stack for storing, settling, financing and managing value around the clock.
Corpay
The company once known for fuel cards now sits inside invoices, hotel bookings, foreign-exchange trades and millions of everyday business purchases. Its next act is a deliberate turn toward corporate payments - with AI, APIs and new settlement rails layered onto an unusually physical financial network.
Visa
Visa is less a card company than a piece of global choreography - a network that turns a tap in a shop into a trusted conversation among banks, merchants and billions of credentials. Now it is extending that choreography to instant payouts, stablecoins and shopping agents.
Citi
Citi’s signature product is not a card or an app. It is a 214-year-old network that moves nearly $6 trillion a day - now being rebuilt for an always-on financial world.
Mastercard
The famous circles sit on billions of cards, but Mastercard's real product is the invisible choreography behind a payment - a global network now learning to serve bank accounts, virtual cards, stablecoins and shopping agents without losing the trust that made the plastic useful.
Paysafe
Paysafe spent 30 years assembling the oddest checkout drawer in finance - cards, cash, wallets, bank rails and crypto. Now it is betting that the messy edges of payments, especially in gaming and the experience economy, are exactly where a specialist can matter.
Global Payments Inc.
The Atlanta payments veteran has rebuilt itself around one job: making commerce work for merchants. After the Worldpay deal, its reach runs from a food-truck handheld to the checkout systems behind global enterprises.
3S Money
3S Money is a London-founded, regulated cross-border payments platform that gives international businesses a single digital account to send, receive and exchange money across 190+ countries and 65+ currencies. It pairs local IBANs and SWIFT/SEPA connectivity with a dedicated human Relationship Manager for each client, positioning itself as a bank alternative for companies with complex or hard-to-serve international payment needs.
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
Sourav Choraria
Sourav Choraria is the co-founder and CEO of Infinity (YC W24), a Bengaluru business banking platform that helps cross-border SMBs and startups send and receive international payments with multi-currency accounts, flat fees, and no FX markup. He built it with his brother Sidharth after watching their family business lose money to slow, opaque international transfers. Before Infinity he was head of growth at Paytm Money, where he helped scale the wealth platform to 20 million monthly users and launched India's first fixed-deposit-backed credit card.
Walid Mah'd
Walid Mah'd is the co-founder and CEO of Moreta (YC S24), a San Francisco fintech that lets international travelers pay with local QR networks in Asia without a bank account in every country. A former Mastercard Advisors payments consultant and Ivey Business School graduate, he built the company after feeling the friction of paying while backpacking across Southeast and East Asia.
Cleva
Cleva is a USD banking platform that lets freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa - starting with Nigeria - open U.S. dollar accounts in their own name, receive international payments via ACH, wire, or stablecoins (USDC/USDT), and spend through a virtual dollar card. Founded in 2023 by Stripe and AWS alumni Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel, and backed by Y Combinator (W24), Cleva helps users get paid in dollars and hedge against local currency volatility.
Coba
Coba is a cross-border financial infrastructure company built for businesses moving money between the United States and Mexico. It started in 2023 as a dual-currency consumer account for Latin American remote workers earning in dollars, and has since pivoted to B2B: multi-currency accounts, CLABE-enabled Mexican peso accounts for US companies, sub-24-hour carrier settlements, and embedded FX rails routed through banking partners, SPEI, ACH, SWIFT, wires, and stablecoins. Its sharpest focus is the US-Mexico freight and logistics corridor, where brokers and carriers have long been underserved by slow, opaque cross-border banking.
Coco Wallet
Coco Wallet (YC S19) is a global dollar account powered by stablecoins. Founded by Venezuelan entrepreneur Kevin Charles and his co-founders, it lets Latin American migrants and their families send, spend, save, and earn in digital dollars from a mobile app - combining the simplicity of a neobank like Nubank or Revolut with the freedom of self-custodial Web3, so people can access stable, borderless money without a traditional bank.
Infinity
Infinity is a Bengaluru-based cross-border payments platform that lets Indian freelancers, exporters, and small businesses receive money from global clients through multi-currency virtual accounts. It converts foreign payments to INR at live FX rates with a flat 0.5% all-inclusive fee, settles funds in about a day, and handles RBI compliance paperwork like FIRA automatically. Founded in 2024 by brothers Sourav and Sidharth Choraria, the company is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.