Stablecoins Meet Local Rails
The money moves in seconds across borders. The problem has always been the last mile — getting those funds into a bank account or mobile wallet a recipient can actually use. Latitude, a Texas-based global payments infrastructure company, is building that bridge, and investors just handed it $35 million to scale.
The startup announced Wednesday that it closed a Series A round led by Oak HC/FT, a venture and growth equity firm. NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed Faction, and OpenFX also participated. The raise follows an $8 million seed round, bringing total disclosed funding to $43 million. CEO Cyril Mathew did not disclose the company's valuation.
The Team Behind the Bet
Latitude was cofounded by Mathew, Brian Wrightson, and Vivek Morzaria. Their collective résumés include Stripe, Uber, Coinbase, and Meta — a roster that signals serious infrastructure credibility in the payments world.
Mathew's conviction came from the field. During a decade in Europe leading international payments at Uber, he spoke with a driver in London who was remitting wages to Morocco by handing a bag of cash to a middleman — who took a 20% cut before the money arrived. That friction, Mathew concluded, was a solvable engineering and regulatory problem.
Later, at Stripe, his team launched stablecoin payouts in 100 countries. Adoption stalled. Users in Vietnam and across Africa said they needed money they could spend locally, not stablecoins sitting in crypto wallets requiring seed-phrase management. The insight crystallized: stablecoins would remain a niche instrument unless recipients could convert them instantly into local currency through familiar channels.
In late 2024, Mathew pitched the concept to Wrightson, still at Stripe, and then to Morzaria. By January 2025, the three were raising their seed round.
What Latitude Actually Does
Latitude gives businesses — neobanks, payroll platforms, marketplaces, and financial firms — the infrastructure to send local currency through bank accounts and mobile wallets using stablecoins as the settlement layer. Rather than each neobank building its own local-payment integrations across 80 countries, they plug into Latitude.
The company currently holds licenses across 45 U.S. markets and plans to pursue direct licensing in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa — regions where stablecoin infrastructure remains thin. The 15-person team operates out of shared offices in New York, San Francisco, and London.
Fresh capital will go toward hiring in compliance, engineering, legal, and sales, as well as maintaining and expanding its regulatory footprint globally.
'When you talk to these large enterprises, they want to work with players that are regulated in the U.S. because it provides a level of certainty and trust,' said Oivind Lorentzen, a partner at Oak HC/FT. 'That's really important when you're moving money.'
The CEO Times Read
This is free enterprise doing what regulators and foreign-aid bureaucracies never could: cutting the cost of moving earned wages across borders without a 20% toll extracted by middlemen. Latitude's model — regulated, licensed, infrastructure-first — is exactly the kind of private-sector solution that scales where government programs stall.
Capital rewards clear rules, and Latitude is betting that U.S. regulatory credibility is itself a competitive moat in emerging markets. If the bet pays off, the winners are the workers in Morocco, Vietnam, and across Africa who keep more of what they earn. The market has already voted: $43 million says this infrastructure is worth building.
