Business
Stablecoin startup Coinflow raises $25 million Series A to challenge Stripe’s payments dominance
Hype about stablecoins is everywhere, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the halls of Congress. But even as interest around the dollar-backed cryptocurrencies grows, companies are still trying to solve the challenge of making them as easy to use as credit cards or digital wallets like Venmo and PayPal. One of the space’s leader is the startup Coinflow, which announced on Wednesday it has raised $25 million in fresh funding to help merchants use stablecoins to achieve faster money movement. Pantera, Coinbase Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, and Jump Capital participated in the Series A round.
Led by cofounder and CEO Daniel Lev, Coinflow is a payment service provider, or PSP, going head-to-head against competitors such as Stripe and Worldpay amid the race to remake global transactions with blockchain technology. But Lev is confident that his scrappier startup can challenge the giants. “Stablecoins is a paradigm shift,” he told Fortune. “There will be a net new winner who was built natively on this technology.”
The future of payments
Coinflow addresses a core problem for many businesses: Even if a customer swipes their card to make a payment, it can often take hours or even days for the merchant to receive the money. By using stablecoins as the intermediary layer, Lev says they can get that time down to seconds.
He argues that Coinflow is creating the next evolution for digital dollars. PSPs like Toast, Square, and Stripe revolutionized payments by allowing both physical and online companies to process transactions through point-of-sale terminals and web interfaces, but legacy networks run by the likes of Mastercard and Visa restrict the speed and cost efficiency of their operations. Stablecoin advocates argues that blockchain technology improves both, with companies like Coinflow allowing pay-ins and pay-outs through fiat so that merchants never even have to deal with stablecoins themselves.
Coinflow has its own partnerships with banks around the world such as Cross River, as well as different stablecoin issuers, which allow it to mint and burn stablecoins directly, and then convert in and out of different currencies and settle payments instantly. It also works across different blockchains, including Solana and Ethereum, though Levy says that most customers are agnostic about the options, caring more about speed and fees.
Lev started Coinflow in 2022 just as Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX was collapsing and enthusiasm around crypto was at an all-time low. “It only took four years of us developing the software and people laughing at us,” he joked. “But now it’s consensus that this is a superpower for moving money.”
Though many of Coinflow’s early customers operated in the crypto realm, this began to change after Stripe made major acquisitions in the space, first buying the stablecoin startup Bridge in 2024 for $1.1 billion before later acquiring the crypto wallet company Privy earlier this year. This exposed more merchants to the technology and, combined with the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto and Congress’s passage of the Genius Act in July, meant that non-blockchain companies felt more comfortable exploring it. “It has not stopped compounding since,” says Levy, who added that most of Coinflow’s growth is now from non-crypto companies.
The bigger challenge for Coinflow will be staving off Stripe, which has delved further into stablecoins since its acquisitions, including launching a new product last week that allows companies to create their own stablecoins. With around 25 employees, Coinflow is significantly smaller than the $106.7 billion behemoth, but Levy argues that his company’s in-house talent and existing relationships across the banking and infrastructure sectors make it competitive. And as companies explore different PSPs to manage payments, he’s confident the best option will win out. “If you can perform better and faster, then volume naturally flows to you,” Levy says.
