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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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 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.
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 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’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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 (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 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.
Karsa is a stablecoin neobank that gives people in emerging markets a global dollar account. Users can deposit local currency, save in dollar-denominated stablecoins, receive international payments, cash out to local banks, and spend abroad with a card - without needing a traditional US bank or any crypto knowledge. The product hides the complexity of self-custody wallets and a peer-to-peer stablecoin network behind a familiar banking interface, targeting the roughly one billion people who live under high inflation and capital controls.
Kontigo is a USDC-based neobank built for Latinos in the U.S. and Latin America. It pairs a self-custody stablecoin wallet with a card, no-fee cross-border transfers, yield on balances, and an AI banker over WhatsApp - aiming to give people in high-inflation economies a dollar account that works across borders. Founded in 2023 and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, it reported roughly 1 million users and over $1 billion in payment volume before raising a $20 million seed round in December 2025.
Milio (YC W23) is a Colombian fintech building real-time, account-to-account payment infrastructure for Latin America. Through a single API, banks, fintechs, and enterprises can move money between accounts in seconds - handling collections, disbursements, cross-border transfers, and treasury automation while cutting transaction costs by up to 80%.
Moreta (Moreta Pay) is a Y Combinator S24 fintech building a mobile wallet that lets international travelers, expats and digital nomads pay local merchants by scanning QR codes across Southeast Asia and Latin America - using their own currency, at real exchange rates, without needing a local bank account. It connects to national QR networks like Indonesia's QRIS, Thailand's PromptPay and the Philippines' QR Ph so a Western visitor can pay at street stalls and cafes the same way a local does.
Settle Network is a Buenos Aires-based fintech that builds the fiat-to-crypto rails Latin America runs on. Through its Latamex gateway and Stellar-based settlement infrastructure, it lets exchanges, businesses, and users convert local currencies like the Argentine peso and Brazilian real into crypto and stablecoins - and back again - in seconds. A Y Combinator S22 company backed by the Stellar Development Foundation, Settle became the on/off ramp behind global exchanges including Binance and OKX across the region.