Yesterday stablecoin startup Bridge announced it has raised a cumulative $58 million in venture funding from Sequoia, Ribbit, Index, Haun Ventures and others. It’s initially offering two sets of APIs, one for issuing stablecoins and the other for orchestrating payments. Bridge supports a variety of stablecoin use cases, but the company’s Head of Revenue seems particularly focused on global B2B payments.
“While local bank interests and network rules worked great in the past, with today’s global work and borderless fund flows we need a truly global framework that can ride on top of financial systems,” Marco Mahrus, Bridge’s Head of Revenue told Primary Venture Partners.
The company outlined its ambitions in a job advertisement stating that it aims to “enable global companies to move and support millions of potential customers.”
To date, stablecoins have primarily been used for a narrow range of purposes – mainly for crypto transactions, by those that live in countries with volatile fiat currencies who wish to hold dollars, and sometimes for (mainly) consumer cross border payments. Beyond emerging economies, usage outside of the crypto sector hasn’t been huge, despite the promise of low cost payments.
SpaceX and stablecoin real world use cases
Yesterday was Bridge’s formal public launch, but it started operations around 18 months ago, so it already has clients. One of them is SpaceX that uses stablecoins for global treasury management. Bridge enables on and off-ramping in numerous currencies around the world, which can be converted to stablecoins for cross border payments.
It also supports payouts from aid organizations, creator platforms, and claims to work with the US government.
In addition to supporting FX conversions between fiat currencies and dollar stablecoins, Bridge enables conversions between different types of stablecoins. Last month it engineered a solution for Coinbase allowing the Tether stablecoin on the Tron blockchain to be converted to the USDC stablecoin on Base, Coinbase’s layer 2 blockchain.
Another client is crypto exchange, Bitso, that is providing Mexican businesses with a cross border MXN-USD payment rail using Bridge’s APIs. It’s also working with apps that target African and Latin American consumers that want to save and spend in US dollars.
The company’s team is pretty experienced. Both co-founders had stints at Coinbase and Square. Head of Revenue Marco Mahrus held similar roles at Uber and corporate card startup BREX. So far the company has money transmitter licenses in 22 U.S. states. In Europe it has a Polish subsidiary which is in the Virtual Currency Activities Register. This is not a MiCA licence, as we don’t believe Poland has yet issued any crypto asset service provider (CASP) registrations.
Meanwhile, Mahrus spoke about the ability of stablecoins to support transactions that arrive in seconds and at a small cost. “When people get access to and are used to frameworks for economic exchange and payments that are available 24/7, no one will go back to a bank branch and wait for SWIFT or wire transactions during bank hours,” he said.
