Cyclops, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company, said on July 15, 2026 that it had raised a $20 million Series A led by Nava Ventures. Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures and Global PayTech Ventures also joined the round. Kevin Chenault, a partner at Nava Ventures, will join the company’s board following the financing.
The deal came about four months after Cyclops completed an $8 million seed round in March 2026. That earlier round was led by Castle Island Ventures, with F-Prime and Shift4 Payments participating. Across the two rounds, Cyclops has raised $28 million in less than six months, and the funding was entirely equity financing.
Company profile and operating scale
Cyclops is based in Miami and has an overseas office in Vienna, Austria. The company positions itself as a stablecoin infrastructure provider for the payments industry, offering an integrated technology stack to payment service providers, acquirers and payment processors.
According to company disclosures cited in the report, the platform has surpassed $2 billion in cumulative transaction volume, operates in 150 countries, holds more than 100 related compliance licenses globally, and has expanded its merchant network to 300,000. It also said recent transaction volume grew 350% month over month.
Founded by payments veterans with crypto experience
Cyclops’ core team comes from both payments and crypto. Its three co-founders previously launched The Giving Block, a crypto donations platform focused on nonprofit organizations. Shift4 Payments acquired that business in 2022, after which the three founders jointly led crypto and stablecoin operations inside Shift4.
Co-founder and co-CEO Alex Wilson has been building crypto and stablecoin infrastructure since 2018. While leading crypto at Shift4, he oversaw work tied to merchant stablecoin acceptance, settlement and payments product development.
Co-founder and co-CEO Pat Duffy launched The Giving Block alongside Wilson and later co-led Shift4’s crypto and stablecoin unit after the acquisition.
Co-founder and president David Johnson, who has a background as an international technology lawyer, is responsible for Cyclops’ global licensing architecture and compliance strategy.
Other key executives include COO Lindsay Wysocki, U.S. chief compliance officer Dan Savitt and head of product Willy Bardiot. Savitt previously served as Coinbase’s global chief compliance officer.
The company has also been recruiting talent from Coinbase, Fiserv and JPMorgan. By the time of the Series A, Cyclops had grown to 31 employees and said it plans to double headcount by year-end.
The problem Cyclops says it is solving
The report says stablecoins can enable 24/7 instant settlement at a cost well below traditional cross-border payment rails. Citing DefiLlama data, it notes that stablecoin market capitalization has grown 137% since 2024 and is now close to $310 billion. It also says the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, created a federal regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance in the U.S.
Even so, payment companies still face major technical fragmentation when they try to adopt stablecoins. Based on the founders’ experience at Shift4, adding one new stablecoin capability often meant integrating separate custodians, KYC/AML vendors, liquidity providers and blockchain node operators, each with its own API, compliance obligations and service-level agreements. Development cycles could stretch for months. That accumulation of technical debt, slow deployment and layered compliance risk led the founders to conclude that fragmented infrastructure had become a core obstacle for stablecoin adoption in payments. They left Shift4 and founded Cyclops in 2025.
The company’s stated goal is to give payment firms a one-stop stablecoin infrastructure layer, allowing PSPs to offer these services to merchants without building or maintaining blockchain components themselves and without turning into crypto companies.
Single API and low-code integration
Cyclops offers low-code or no-code integration through a single API that covers fiat and stablecoin settlement, pay-ins, payouts and treasury management. A payment company calls one interface, while Cyclops handles cross-chain routing, liquidity orchestration, compliance checks and fault tolerance in the background. According to Fortune, the platform can shorten launch timelines from months or even years to a matter of weeks.
Solana-first settlement design
Cyclops has chosen Solana as its preferred settlement network. The report says Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, reaches finality in under a second and keeps per-transaction fees very low. Citing Solana Foundation data, it says the stablecoin ecosystem on Solana expanded from about $1.83 billion at the start of 2025 to $9.3 billion by the third quarter of 2025. At the same time, Cyclops has continued integrating with other public blockchains, including Ethereum, to broaden low-cost on-chain settlement options.
Compliance structure
Johnson designed Cyclops’ global licensing architecture, which the report says reaches more than 100 licensed jurisdictions through dozens of partners. The company has also started its own licensing process in the U.S. and Europe, including money transmission licenses in individual U.S. states and a MiCA application filed in Austria. Savitt’s regulatory background is presented as another part of the firm’s compliance capability.
Built around payment processor workflows
Unlike general-purpose crypto infrastructure aimed at developers, Cyclops says its product is designed around the way payment processors operate. That includes settlement reconciliation, merchant onboarding workflows, and integration with existing POS hardware and payment systems. The platform supports more than 400 digital assets and operates in more than 150 countries.
In the operating model described in the report, consumers still pay by card and see no change at the front end. At the end of the day, Cyclops converts settlement funds into USDC and sends them directly to a merchant wallet, replacing the one- to three-day delay that is typical in bank-based settlement and allowing funds to arrive around the clock.
Commercial rollout and named customers
Cyclops completed its $8 million seed financing in March 2026 and formally began commercial operations at that point.
Among publicly named customers, the report identifies Shift4 Payments and Mastercard as current core clients working with Cyclops on stablecoin settlement products. Shift4 was also an investor in the seed round, and its base of more than 300,000 merchants represents a potential customer pool for Cyclops. The platform has also supported around-the-clock stablecoin settlement for companies including Blade helicopter mobility and Blue Origin.
On market expansion, the company is currently prioritizing North America and the European Union, using existing compliance licenses to strengthen its footprint in those regions. Over the medium to long term, it plans to focus on cross-border trade payment opportunities in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
Since commercialization began, transaction volume has grown 350% month over month, according to the report. The company is also continuing to connect with blockchains including Ethereum and Solana to expand low-cost settlement routes.
Competitive positioning
The report groups current business-to-business stablecoin infrastructure providers into three broad categories and argues that Cyclops occupies a distinct niche.
- One group includes broad crypto financial infrastructure providers such as ZeroHash and BVNK. Their strength is a wider product set spanning brokerage, custody and conversion. The report says the drawback is that these offerings are more generalized, serving exchanges, asset managers and payments companies at the same time, which leaves less room for deep payment-specific customization and can increase integration work.
- A second group includes issuer-linked business solutions such as Circle Payments. Their advantage is native USDC integration. The report says the tradeoff is greater dependence on a single stablecoin and less neutrality across different stablecoin options.
- Cyclops, by contrast, says it focuses only on payment industry clients such as acquirers, payment processors and PSPs. It does not take on exchange business and does not build consumer retail wallets. Its product functions are designed around merchant acquiring and merchant settlement, while connecting neutrally to multiple stablecoins and on-chain service providers. The report also notes that, compared with longer-established competitors such as ZeroHash, Cyclops is still early in commercialization, has fewer customer case studies and is still expanding its global licensing footprint.
The article also distinguishes Cyclops from companies such as Ubyx and Fnality, which are more focused on interbank and wholesale settlement, and from Stripe and Visa, which are exploring stablecoin payments from the merchant traffic side rather than from the infrastructure layer. It says those projects do not currently compete directly with Cyclops.
The broader argument in the piece is that Cyclops is targeting a relatively open niche. Much of the existing B2B stablecoin infrastructure market serves diversified institutions or end enterprises, while fewer providers are built specifically for payment service firms managing large-scale operations across huge numbers of small and midsize merchants.
What the report highlights next
The report says Cyclops now has three early advantages: capital backing, founders with industry relationships, and a first set of reference customers. It also says the company still faces several open questions, including how shifting stablecoin regulation across jurisdictions could affect licensing expansion, whether it can sustain rapid transaction growth in a B2B sales cycle that is often lengthy, and how it will hold up as established rivals continue updating their payment-focused offerings.
Its medium- to long-term development, according to the article, will hinge on whether it can add more top-tier payment service partners, complete compliance buildout in key regions and keep building product depth in the verticals it targets.