Velocity Completes $10 Million Series A Extension Financing
Stablecoin payment and fund management platform Velocity has announced the completion of a $10 million Series A extension financing, with investments from Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures, Ripple, Haun Ventures, Translink Capital, and Mirana Ventures.
This extension follows Velocity's announcement last month of a completed $38 million Series A financing, bringing the total Series A funding to $48 million. The company stated that the funds will be used to enhance the coverage of stablecoin infrastructure across issuing institutions, acquiring institutions, payment service providers, financial institutions, and merchants globally.
Eric Queathem, founder and CEO of Velocity, stated that the company has always focused on improving the flow of funds within the payment ecosystem since its inception. He noted that the newly joined investors, including Visa itself through Visa Ventures, are at the core of the payment ecosystem and will provide valuable insights for the company to transform the payment experience using stablecoins.
Rubail Birwadker, head of global growth products and strategic partnerships at Visa, stated that stablecoins are reshaping the way value flows within the Visa ecosystem, and companies like Velocity are accelerating this process, creating new opportunities for Visa's clients and partners. The investments from Circle Ventures and Ripple are seen as establishing connections for Velocity with two major companies in compliance stablecoins and their applications in payments, liquidity, and institutional finance. The investment from Translink Capital has built a strategic bridge for Velocity's partnerships with enterprises and institutions in Asia.
Chris Ahn, partner at Haun Ventures, mentioned that the firm has previously invested in two companies in the stablecoin infrastructure space, Bridge and BVNK, and that Velocity represents the "next stage evolution" of this investment logic. He believes that stablecoins are evolving from merely enhancing transaction speed to becoming a foundational layer supporting the global financial system, and that Velocity is developing technology that allows large institutions to directly embed stablecoins into their payment and fund management operations.
From a market mechanism perspective, investors like Visa, Circle, and Ripple are themselves key nodes in the stablecoin payment ecosystem. Visa, as a global card organization, secures its early positioning in the stablecoin settlement wave through strategic investments. Circle (the issuer of USDC) and Ripple expand the actual circulation depth of their issued stablecoins in institutional settlement and fund management scenarios by investing in intermediary infrastructure companies like Velocity. This model of "issuer + clearing network" jointly investing in application layer infrastructure companies essentially exchanges capital binding for distribution channels and scenario embedding. Haun Ventures' continuous bets on multiple stablecoin infrastructure companies like Bridge, BVNK, and Velocity represent a sustained commitment of crypto-native venture capital to the entire sector, rather than betting on a single entity. Who benefits: Infrastructure companies with institutional-level stablecoin settlement and fund management capabilities can leverage the capital and channel support of issuers and clearing networks to accelerate penetration into issuing institutions, acquiring institutions, and corporate finance departments. Who is under pressure: Traditional cross-border settlement and liquidity management service providers that still rely on pre-funded, interbank wire transfers, and bank working hour restrictions may gradually amplify their efficiency disadvantages.
According to the company, Velocity claims to be the first stablecoin payment and fund management platform designed specifically for global CFOs and finance executives. By combining compliant stablecoins with traditional financial infrastructure, it enables enterprises to allocate funds in real-time, manage liquidity more efficiently, and simplify global settlements, helping finance teams reduce foreign exchange and liquidity friction, free up occupied funds, and enhance visibility into global cash flows.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The investors in this round each have clear historical layouts: Circle, as the issuer of USDC, has long invested in stablecoin infrastructure startups through Circle Ventures; Ripple has consistently focused on institutional-level cross-border payments and stablecoin settlements; Haun Ventures, founded by well-known investor Katie Haun in the crypto space, focuses on stablecoins and financial infrastructure, having previously invested in Bridge (later acquired by Stripe) and BVNK, with this investment in Velocity clearly stated by its partners as "the next stage evolution of this investment logic."
The investors in this round almost cover the key links of the stablecoin value chain—issuers (Circle), clearing networks (Visa, Ripple), cross-border enterprise cooperation networks (Translink Capital), and crypto-native long-term capital (Haun Ventures, Mirana Ventures). The logic of fund mobilization is to strategically invest in intermediary infrastructure companies like Velocity that connect stablecoins with traditional banks and fund management systems, allowing their issued stablecoins or clearing networks to be embedded more quickly into the actual fund flow scenarios of institutional clients, rather than relying solely on direct expansion of institutional clients.
This model of "issuer + clearing network + crypto-native capital" jointly betting on a single infrastructure company is similar to the early strategy of Visa and Mastercard investing in multiple fintech clearing and identity verification startups, with the core demand being to ensure that new settlement tracks can be compatible with and benefit from their existing networks, rather than being bypassed. The current industry position of Velocity is a key early stage in the penetration of stablecoins from "exchange and personal transfer tools" to "enterprise-level fund management and interbank settlement infrastructure."
This essentially belongs to "industrial chain reconstruction": traditional enterprise fund management and cross-border settlement heavily rely on pre-funding, interbank clearing windows, and multi-layer agency bank networks, leading to time and liquidity frictions in fund flow; platforms like Velocity attempt to replace some interbank clearing processes with stablecoin settlement layers, centralizing the fund dispatch functions that were originally dispersed among various agency banks and clearinghouses onto a stablecoin settlement infrastructure that can operate around the clock. This reconstruction is possible because stablecoins possess on-chain real-time settlement characteristics that are not restricted by bank working hours, precisely addressing the structural pain point of traditional cross-border fund management where "efficiency losses concentrate at the settlement window and pre-funding stages," while the capital backing from issuers and clearing networks accelerates the process of this new infrastructure gaining institutional trust and channel embedding.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- Whoever embeds into the settlement network first gets the ticket.
- Bank's rest time is stablecoin's trading time.
- Issuers investing in channel providers are buying distribution, not equity.