Zach Walsh and the money between the machines

In 2017, Zach Walsh was 18, sitting in a New York Starbucks, emailing people who had no particular reason to reply. He had moved to the city with a laptop and no connections. He wanted to know: would somebody in technology give a young person with little experience a chance? The replies, when they came, tended toward no. Eventually there was a yes.

He later recalled painting his small apartment on East 77th Street. The place was a shoebox, he said, and the memories were good. Before the talk of programmable dollars and digital assets came a young arrival putting paint on a wall. New York has always been happy to accept ambition; it generally asks for the rent first.

Walsh would go on to co-found HIFI, the financial infrastructure company he runs with Mohamed Afifi. Its work involves connecting stablecoins, bank accounts and payment networks. But his earliest New York problem was already a problem of connection: he needed an opening into a system that did not know him.

A career assembled after hours

His route ran through Sony and Uber, then Quadpay, the buy-now-pay-later business he helped scale before its acquisition. His education ran alongside employment. He worked during the day and finished his degree at night, with a period spent sleeping on a friend’s couch. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, graduating cum laude from the City University of New York.

Those jobs gave him repeated encounters with payments from different directions. For a person using an app, a transaction can appear to be a button and a confirmation. For the people building the app, it is a series of obligations involving institutions, currencies and records. The tidy screen is the end of a great deal of untidy work.

Fintech, Walsh has joked, is a career that “just happens to you.” His own version involved noticing how awkward crypto payments remained even as companies grew interested in using them. A digital asset could travel, yet the infrastructure around the journey was missing. He and Afifi, an early connection from his move to New York, founded HIFI in 2022. The original name, HIFI Bridge, made its purpose fairly explicit.

One yes was enough to begin

Walsh joined Antler’s New York program in spring 2023 while building HIFI’s API. He worked in a back corner, arriving early and leaving late. The company initially failed to win the necessary investment votes. Jeff Becker, an Antler partner, backed him anyway. Walsh has credited that support with opening doors to subsequent investors.

In his own recollection of early fundraising, Walsh described a bank balance going from zero to $175,000. Another six months passed before he raised his first million. Those are useful numbers because they restore the distance between deciding to start a company and having the means to keep it running. A first cheque buys time. The next one requires another round of persuasion.

By February 2026, there was a more expensive prop available. Walsh sent Becker a photograph of himself holding a sheet of paper announcing $10 million, and asked whether he should post it. He did not. For somebody building a business concerned with the movement of money, he seemed quite capable of leaving a fundraising announcement stationary.

Becker’s account describes a founder whose interest in entrepreneurship preceded his interest in stablecoins. That order matters. Walsh had wanted to build something of his own; payments supplied a problem he had encountered at work. His career did not begin with a prediction about a token. It began with learning how businesses operate.

“Bank partnerships aren’t hard to get. They’re hard to keep.”

Zach Walsh

The bank still has to answer

HIFI’s basic proposition is that another company should be able to build a financial product without constructing every connection beneath it. Its API brings together accepting funds, converting value, routing payments and settling them. The platform also includes controls such as approvals and limits. The developer gets an interface; HIFI takes on the work of making different systems cooperate.

Walsh’s public discussion of that work can be strikingly unglamorous. “Bank partnerships aren’t hard to get. They’re hard to keep,” he wrote. He described compliance staffing as deserving the same resources as engineering, and emphasized that banking relationships require ongoing transaction monitoring. Regional differences demand different operating approaches. A process that works in one market cannot simply be photocopied into another.

His argument puts the daily work ahead of the deal. Maintaining a relationship is less photogenic than announcing one, but it decides whether customers can continue using the product. The initial agreement starts a responsibility that recurs with every payment. Walsh’s account places bank sponsors and compliance programs near the beginning of HIFI’s development, before the product became the public face of the business.

For his customers, this work is supposed to recede from view. A payroll provider wants people paid. A marketplace wants sellers to receive proceeds. Neither benefits from turning its own engineering team into a collection of specialists negotiating separate financial connections. HIFI sells the ability to work above that tangle while still remaining connected to it.

A dollar needs an exit

The practical test comes when a payment crosses a border and the recipient needs spendable local money. HIFI’s integration with Circle Payments Network gives it access to established banking and payment relationships through one network connection. New routes can become available to developers already using HIFI without requiring them to rebuild their integration for each country.

The difference shows up in the timetable. Opening direct coverage market by market can require years of licensing and banking work. With the Circle network, HIFI described adding a route in roughly three months. Its expanded connections include Mexico’s SPEI, Brazil’s PIX and Hong Kong’s CHATS/FPS. These are the names behind the destination: the local systems through which money becomes useful to the recipient.

By March 2026, HIFI had processed more than $100 million through Circle Payments Network and more than $500 million in USDC. Those figures describe different scopes of activity. They are evidence of actual payment flows rather than a forecast of how much money might one day move.

Another view comes from HIFI’s work on Polygon. By July 2026, it had settled more than $227 million across over six million transactions on that network since January 2025. The workloads included supplier payments, payroll conversions and treasury movements. Walsh’s explanation of the appeal emphasized reliability and a network designed with payments in mind. His chosen selling points sound like the requirements of someone who expects the system to be used repeatedly, including on an inconvenient Tuesday.

From payroll to the cash side of a trade

In June 2026, HIFI completed an onchain repurchase transaction with DRW and Marex on the Canton Network. A repo is a way to obtain short-term financing against securities. Here, DRW supplied U.S. Treasuries, Marex acted as prime broker, and the trade was priced through Tradeweb. HIFI provided the cash side.

The sequence is more revealing than the label. Money moved from traditional fiat rails through real-time payments into USDC, then into USDCx for settlement on Canton. Cash and collateral settled together. When the transaction matured, the route reversed. The arrangement preserved familiar institutional trading roles while changing how the underlying transfer occurred.

July brought HIFI’s participation in production trades using DTC-tokenized assets. The wider group included BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and other established market participants. The event covered several kinds of transaction, including Treasury repo and delivery-versus-payment. HIFI was working inside a gathering of financial infrastructure, where getting the cash leg right matters as much as issuing the asset.

Walsh has argued that institutions may want to use tokenized markets while keeping cash in their existing banking and treasury systems until it is needed. A digital security does not, by itself, solve the problem of financing a purchase. His focus is on the passage into the trade and the return journey afterward.

That is a consistent extension of the earlier payments business. Whether the destination is a supplier’s bank account or a securities transaction, the useful question remains concrete: where is the money now, where must it arrive, and what has to happen between those two points?

The announcement he finally made

On September 24, 2026, Walsh announced HIFI’s $37 million Series A, led by Left Lane Capital, with Matt Miller joining the board. HIFI reported processing more than $7 billion a year, and said usage among existing customers had grown more than fourfold in six months. Businesses building on its platform had collectively onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals.

Walsh laid out three uses for the money: additional regulatory licenses, hiring in New York and selected international markets, and expansion into cards and capital markets. The plan brings more of the operation under HIFI’s direct control while extending what customers can build. It also brings the company further into questions of custody and control, where software has to meet institutional requirements.

By October, HIFI was also examining payments initiated by AI agents. An October 22 company report, written by Srivatsav Erramilli, distinguished a valid payment instruction from completed settlement. An agent may have permission to buy something, yet the recipient still needs to receive the right asset through an acceptable route. Identity, spending limits, screening and reconciliation all remain.

The newer customer may be software. The old coordination problem survives. Walsh’s company keeps returning to the gaps between systems, where a transaction that looks finished in one place still has work to do somewhere else. That is an unusually durable subject for a business founded around a fast-changing technology.

Back in Starbucks, the opening he needed depended on somebody answering an email. Today, the connections are more elaborate, and the amounts are larger. The work still rewards a willingness to stay with a problem after the first attempt fails. Walsh has made that willingness into a career. HIFI is his attempt to make the waiting shorter for everyone else.