Augustus said Tuesday it has raised $180 million in a Series B round that values the company at $1 billion, as the startup pushes to build a federally chartered clearing bank designed around stablecoins and programmable money.
Tiger Global led the round. Participants included Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel. Augustus also said the deal drew support from fintech and crypto figures including Circle co-founder Sean Neville, former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan, and Rain's Farooq Malik. Total funding to date has reached $210 million, according to the company.
Focus on correspondent banking infrastructure
Augustus is going after correspondent banking, the system that lets money move across borders between financial institutions. The company is not issuing its own stablecoin. Instead, it is building infrastructure that allows banks and fintech firms to transact across both traditional rails and blockchain networks.
Its API-first platform supports operating accounts and FBO accounts, with settlement through Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoins. The platform runs on a proprietary core banking system called Marble, which Augustus said enables faster settlement and 24/7 availability by deploying AI across back-office functions.
Why stablecoins sit at the center of the pitch
Stablecoins are central to the significance of the raise for financial markets. These tokens are generally built to maintain a steady value, usually pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, and they allow market participants to enter and exit trades without needing direct access to dollars.
Dollar-pegged stablecoins have grown into a multibillion-dollar settlement layer. Augustus said that growth has extended the reach of the U.S. dollar while putting pressure on the slower correspondent banking system, which remains bound to weekday operating windows even though it still underpins cross-border payments. By connecting stablecoin rails directly to a chartered bank, Augustus is positioning this emerging crypto infrastructure as an upgrade to mainstream financial plumbing rather than as a workaround outside the system.
Conditional charter approval and expansion plans
The financing follows Augustus' conditional approval in May for a U.S. national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The company said that made it the eighth bank to receive conditional approval since 2010. Augustus also said crypto exchange Kraken is already among its customers.
"We started Augustus with a simple thesis: the Dollar is the greatest product in the world but its distribution is fundamentally broken," said Ferdinand Dabitz, CEO and co-founder. "This financing lets us execute on our mission to provide high-quality dollar access to international fintechs and banks. It's time to dollarize the world."
Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa in view
Augustus described the effort in part as a geopolitical bet, pointing to China's digital yuan and Russia's proposed BRICS Pay as challenges to Western currency dominance. The company said it plans to use the new capital to expand across Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where access to dollars remains limited.