Walapay Inc., a global payments infrastructure firm using stablecoins for account issuance and payouts, today announced it has raised $4.6 million in a seed round led by Generative Ventures to bring global payments to local businesses.
Commerce Ventures, Rally Cap VC, Polygon, Verda Ventures, NGC Ventures, FGV Capital, Digital Finance Group, Knollwood and Big Brain Holdings also participated in the round.
Founded by brothers Tom and Dimitri Borgers, Walapay uses blockchain technology and a single application programming interface to move money across currencies and geographies. It provides direct integrations in regions including Latin America, Africa and Asia, helping businesses quickly settle accounts, receive collections and make payouts.
“We believe next-generation payment rails will become first-class financial infrastructure, but the banking system isn’t going away anytime soon,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Tom Borgers.
According to the company, most global payment platforms focus only on the correspondent bank, never reaching the last mile where money ends up in a local account, in local currency through a local bank. Walapay seeks to close this gap, which is ordinarily filled by a third-party payment processor, licenses, numerous aggregators and other systems that extract fees and add time to the settlement and money movement across borders.
Walapay said a single cross-border payment today may pass through four or five separate banks and payment service providers before it settles. Each adds its own fees, delays and potential points of failure.
The company’s platform provides financial technology companies and payment service providers with instant settlement for multicurrency accounts and real-time action in emerging markets. This includes cryptocurrency markets such as stablecoins and the capability to convert idle cash into yield-generating accounts.
A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that has a value tied, or “pegged,” to another asset like the U.S. dollar to prevent the wild price swings common to other digital currency tokens. Walapay allows companies to issue their own stablecoins to swap them for a wide variety of other cryptocurrencies and other regional currencies.
To make this happen, Walapay works with banking and digital asset infrastructure partners to provide flexible custody support for customers who want to maintain their own digital currency or have it managed. This may depend on enterprise regional regulatory needs or operational requirements; not all companies want or can work directly with cryptocurrency or stablecoins.
The company said the new funding will allow the firm to expand its licensing footprint and deepen banking partnerships. As interest in swift cross-border payment settlements increases, it will also grow its team to assist more financial institutions and customers shifting onto modern payment systems.
Walapay added that it’s also building a new category of demand surrounding artificial intelligence-native commerce. As autonomous agents increasingly engage in financial transactions and move money on their own, they need the same instant, compliant mechanisms that fintechs and payment processors use today.
The company said that instead of building a new, agent-specific payments product, it intends to treat AI-driven money as another market its infrastructure is already built to serve. That way, when autonomous agents expand within the financial market landscape, they will not enter as second-class citizens but will have access to the same tools.