$20M Series A: Building the New Backbone of Global Payments

Today we are announcing a $20M Series A, led by Nava Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, Circle Ventures, GPT Ventures and Lasagna Ventures.

Stablecoins are becoming core infrastructure for global money movement. Despite this, the sector that would benefit the most from stablecoins, global payment companies, has been slow to adopt them. Why? There are certainly no shortage of options.

But there is no end-to-end solution.

The Problem: Too Many Parts, No Backbone

There are hundreds of platforms solving pieces of the stablecoin puzzle: wallets, on/off ramps, licensing, settlement, FX. Individually, many of them are excellent. But today, a payments company that wants to build real stablecoin infrastructure has to pick out each of these parts themselves, stitch them together, and maintain the complex system of provider relationships and integrations — all while running a business with thousands of employees and countless other priorities.

Faced with that complexity, most payments companies do the rational thing: they "check the box." They either sign with one generalist platform with myriad weaknesses, or they bolt on one or two narrow, specialized solutions. In either case, they solve a small stablecoin problem for a handful of vocal merchants, rather than tackling significant problems that significantly improve their bottom line. They declare victory over the small problem, and move on. The result? The trillions of dollars in global money movement that could be optimized with stablecoins is not.

Cyclops built the platform that ends that trade-off, unlocking that optimization.

Built by Payments Executives Who've Lived This Problem

Our team has spent over a decade building stablecoin and payments infrastructure, including inside a large public payments company, where we personally managed the vendor sprawl, broken integrations, and compromises that fragmentation forces on you.

Since coming out of stealth, we've brought on leaders from Coinbase, Fiserv, Shift4, JP Morgan, Spreedly, SpaceX, and Paysafe, joined the Mastercard Crypto Program, and built out compliance infrastructure led by Coinbase's former global Chief Compliance Officer.

That experience — and the fact that our platform is already processing volume growing 350% month over month with the industry's top payments platforms — is why leaders across payments and stablecoins, from the founders of Adyen to Circle, are backing what we're building.

Our Approach: Connect What Works, Build What’s Missing

Cyclops isn't trying to out-build every specialist in the stablecoin ecosystem. We're doing the opposite. Cyclops identifies the best solution for every layer of the stack — settlement, payouts, payment acceptance, treasury — and orchestrates them into a single platform, accessible through one API. As a result, Cyclops dedicates our technical resources to building everything the payments company needs to integrate into their individual systems.

Where a payments company would otherwise need ten vendor relationships, redundant compliance reviews, and months of integration work, Cyclops gives them one relationship and one integration. Where other platforms hand a client a toolkit and say "build it," we build it with them, and for them.

This philosophy isn't new to our founding team. We built The Giving Block, the premier crypto philanthropy platform that enables nonprofits, universities, and charities to accept crypto donations on the same premise, by identifying what nonprofits actually needed and building a full solution. That approach took The Giving Block to over 90% market share among nonprofits accepting crypto.

Why Cyclops Only Works With Payments Companies

We're building for the payments platforms and networks that move money, the companies with the scale, licensing complexity, and global footprint that make fragmentation most painful, and where fixing it creates the most value. That focus shapes everything about the platform:

• Stablecoin settlement that lets merchants get paid faster, including on weekends and holidays, with treasury consolidated into the currencies that reduce FX exposure.
• Global payouts — B2B and B2C, stablecoin or fiat — for payroll, gig work, remittances, and refunds, available 24/7/365.
• Stablecoin and crypto payment acceptance with instant settlement and no chargeback risk, integrated like any other payment method.
• Treasury optimization across the full payment lifecycle from improving FX rates, accessing better liquidity in emerging markets to better capital efficiency and higher yields.

Underneath all of it sits the most redundant licensing network in the industry — over 100 licenses across our partners, with multiple licensed options in most regions. For our clients, the question shifts from "do you have a license here?" to "which of our ten options fits this use case best?"

What's Next for Cyclops

Trillions of dollars in payment volume are waiting to move onto faster, cheaper, global rails. The technology to do it already exists, but it's scattered across too many platforms for any single payments company to assemble alone.

Cyclops is putting the pieces together, so the world's largest payments companies don't have to.

Sound interesting? Join us. We’re hiring.

Thank you to our investors Nava, Global PayTech Ventures, Coinbase, Castle Island Ventures, Lasagna, F-Prime Capital, OpenFX and Circle.