Rain adds Ansa in merchant wallet push
Stablecoin card issuer Rain has acquired Ansa, a startup whose software lets merchants launch their own branded prepaid wallets.
The product Rain is buying is built on fiat, not on stablecoins. Ansa’s wallets hold dollar balances that customers preload and then spend with the brand that issued the wallet. Neither company described a stablecoin component inside the technology being acquired.
Rain said it wants to pair those prefunded balances with its own Visa and Mastercard issuing capabilities, so users can spend outside the merchant that originally sold the wallet. The broader goal is to run wallets, rewards and stablecoins on a single platform.
Ansa’s funding history and leadership
Ansa was founded in 2022 by Sophia Goldberg, who previously spent several years at Adyen managing global accounts and product, and JT Cho, a former engineer at Affirm.
The company emerged from stealth in April 2023 with $5.4 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. It then raised a $14 million Series A in April 2024 led by Renegade Partners, bringing total disclosed funding to $19.4 million.
As part of the deal, Goldberg will become Rain’s head of payments.
The “Starbucks wallet” pitch
In Rain’s announcement, Goldberg said, 「Every great merchant or consumer brand eventually wants their own version of the Starbucks wallet, but very few have the infrastructure to pull it off.」
Ansa sold that infrastructure through white-label APIs, mobile SDKs and an incentive engine that puts expiration dates on rewards to encourage customers to return sooner.
The startup named Washington, D.C. coffee chain Compass Coffee and music gear marketplace Reverb as customers. In an Ansa case study, Compass said customers who adopted the wallet increased their visits by 30%.
Rain co-founder and CEO Farooq Malik announced the transaction on X on Tuesday morning. He wrote that the combined product is aimed at 「sports teams, venues, hotels, cruise lines, and more.」
Questions around the Mastercard setup
The technical claim behind the acquisition is that Ansa found a way for a closed-loop balance to be spent on hardware merchants already have in place. Rain said Ansa 「struck a truly novel arrangement with Mastercard」 that allows stored balances to be spent in-store over Mastercard rails at an existing terminal, while online and in-app transactions are authorized against Ansa’s API rather than a card network.
Neither company has published how that setup works, and Mastercard has not publicly described the arrangement.
When Ansa launched its in-store product, Ansa Anywhere, in September 2024, the company described it as tap-to-pay through Apple Pay and Google Pay and as 「POS- and PSP-agnostic.」 That release did not mention Mastercard.
Rain’s second acquisition in nine months
This is Rain’s second acquisition in nine months. In November 2025, the company bought card-linked rewards platform Uptop. Rain said Uptop now runs fan programs for the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Detroit Pistons and LSU athletics. That deal came after Rain’s $58 million Series B led by Sapphire Ventures.
On Jan. 9, 2026, Rain raised $250 million in a Series C led by ICONIQ at a $1.95 billion valuation. The round pushed total funding above $338 million. At the time, the company said it worked with more than 200 partners, processed more than $3 billion in annualized transactions and had grown its active card base 30x from the prior year.
Last week, Rain launched Stablecard with Western Union in 37 markets. The Visa card spends the remittance company’s USDPT stablecoin.
Programmable balances and AI agents
Rain linked the acquisition to agentic commerce. The company argued that a stored-value balance governed by rules around who can spend it, where it can be spent and how long it remains valid is the same primitive as the scoped cards it sells for AI agents.
Rain said Goldberg will also work on that product line, but it did not give a timeline.
Card networks are moving in the same direction. Mastercard opened its card rails to AI agents in June, with 31 crypto and fintech launch partners.