As crypto prices soar to all-time highs, venture investors are pouring capital into a red-hot corner of the blockchain industry: infrastructure for stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies designed to hold a fixed 1:1 peg to fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.
This climate has helped BVNK, a U.K.-based stablecoin infrastructure company, raise a $50 million, all-equity Series B funding round led by the crypto-focused megafund Haun Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and existing investor Tiger Global. The round values BVNK at around $750 million, according to a source familiar with the deal. A spokesperson for BVNK declined to comment on the valuation.
The investment comes on the heels of the highest-value acquisition in the crypto industry’s history, which saw payments giant Stripe acquire stablecoin infrastructure startup Bridge in October for $1.1 billion. The deal turned the heads of many generalist investors and fintech operators who had dismissed blockchain companies after the sector’s tumultuous past two years. Bridge had announced a $58 million funding round from Haun Ventures, as well as the more generalist firms Sequoia, Ribbit, and Index, just two months before.
In an interview with Fortune, BVNK cofounder and CEO Jesse Hemson-Struthers described his company as the “global leader” in the stablecoin infrastructure vertical, saying that the Bridge acquisition offered “validation,” though BVNK has operated since 2021. “Every competitor of Stripe is coming to us saying, ‘Stripe’s done this, how can we get involved in the space now?’” Hemson-Struthers told Fortune.
Stablecoin fervor
The early promise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin was to create a new global peer-to-peer payment system that didn’t need intermediaries like banks or governments. While Bitcoin and a slew of other cryptocurrencies have exploded in popularity, users have mostly turned to them for speculation and stores of value, with the assets too volatile and costly to use as a means of payment.
The exception has been stablecoins, where the largely unregulated Tether is the clear leader with a market cap of around $140 billion, followed by the Circle and Coinbase-backed USDC, which has a market cap of around $42 billion. Because of their (ostensible) peg to the U.S. dollar, offerings like Tether and USDC serve as a more stable holding for crypto investors and some everyday people without access to the dollar. Still, the prohibitive cost and difficulty of moving between fiat currencies and stablecoins have made them an imperfect payment system.
Infrastructure companies like Bridge and BVNK are trying to solve that problem. By gaining state and national financial licenses, as well as forming partnerships with on- and off-ramps between the fiat and crypto worlds, these startups aim to make it easy for companies to adopt stablecoins for a variety of use cases, from global payroll to cross-border settlement. BVNK and Bridge are also both stablecoin-agnostic, meaning they work with different types of assets. “It’s effectively making fiat and stablecoins almost interchangeable from a corporation’s perspective,” said BVNK investor and Coinbase Ventures vice president Shan Aggarwal.
And even while many jurisdictions, including the U.S., deliberate on regulation to supervise the nascent sector, crypto advocates argue that stablecoins will still replace the unwieldy patchwork of international banking and payments, run through antiquated systems like the SWIFT network that are slow and expensive.
“We’re obviously excited about the inflection point we’re seeing with stablecoins across this year,” said Aggarwal. “It’s the mainstream moment.”
BVNK differentiation
While BVNK will draw inevitable comparisons to Bridge, both in terms of product offering and valuation, Hemson-Struthers and his investors were quick to distinguish between the two companies.
BVNK has a one-year head start on Bridge, which was founded in 2022 by two Coinbase and Square alumni, Zach Abrams and Sean Yu. BVNK has also focused on the European and Asian markets, though it is opening offices in San Francisco and New York and plans to launch in the U.S. in January.
A significant part of the value proposition of BVNK or Bridge is their licensure and relationships with financial institutions, which facilitates the ability to move money across different fiat currencies. BVNK has a virtual asset service provider license in Spain—a higher bar, Hemson-Struthers said, than an Eastern European license, which Bridge holds in Poland. Hemson-Struthers said this has allowed BVNK to strike up partnerships with key European banks, including Barclays, BBVA, Deutsche Bank, and Santander.
While BVNK mostly flew under the radar, including with many crypto investors and operators, until the Bridge acquisition, it has built a substantial business through high-profile clients like the U.S. payroll and outsourcing startup Deel, which uses BVNK to pay thousands of contractors globally. According to Hemson-Struthers, BVNK has an annualized revenue of $40 million and processes $10 billion in annualized transaction volume.
Even with BVNK’s success, the Bridge acquisition served as a catalyst for the new funding round. In an interview, Haun Ventures general partner Diogo Mónica said that he had previously invested in BVNK as an angel investor, but avoided investing in the company when he joined Haun earlier this year because of its work with Bridge—venture firms typically do not invest in two competitors, like Uber and Lyft. Bridge’s acquisition opened the door for Haun to lead BVNK’s Series B.
Despite Bridge’s rapid acquisition by Stripe following its funding round, Mónica and Aggarwal insisted that they intend for BVNK to keep growing independently. “You don’t want to be a business builder and then you flip a company,” Mónica told Fortune. “You want to be a business builder and then get a $100 billion outcome.”
