Cross-Border Payments Infrastructure Bets on Stablecoin Rails as Walapay Raises $4.6M
Generative Ventures has led a $4.6 million seed round into a New York startup building a bridge between banks and stablecoin settlement. The capital is modest, the investor base is crypto-native, and one product feature lands in the most contested grey area of the new US stablecoin law.
Walapay, a cross-border payments infrastructure startup based in New York, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding to connect banks and financial institutions directly onto stablecoin and modern payment rails. The round was led by Generative Ventures, with Commerce Ventures, Polygon and a syndicate of smaller crypto-focused funds also taking part. For a company that already reports $2.5 billion in annualised total payment volume (TPV), the raise reads as a conviction top-up from existing backers rather than a competitive step change, and the more interesting detail sits in how the money will be spent.
What did Walapay raise, and who is behind it?
The company, founded by brothers Tom and Dimitri Borgers, offers enterprises, fintechs, payment service providers and financial institutions a single API for account issuance, collections, foreign exchange and payouts, with direct local rail integrations across Latin America, Africa and Asia. It says it operates in more than 180 countries and supports over 60 currencies, and counts the Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange-listed payments group Nuvei, alongside stablecoin-native firms Kast and Bastion, among its customers.
One point the announcement leaves out is that Generative Ventures is not a new face on the cap table. Company records show the firm backed Walapay at pre-seed stage, which makes this seed round a case of the lead investor doubling down rather than a fresh outside endorsement. At $4.6 million, the raise is seed-stage working capital, enough to fund specific licensing and hiring goals but well short of the balance sheet needed to win a capital-intensive infrastructure market outright. Walapay has grown quickly, from roughly $1 million in annualised volume to a reported $2.5 billion, but investors reading the number should treat annualised TPV as a run-rate throughput figure rather than revenue.
Why is a crypto-native investor syndicate backing a payments startup?
The composition of the round is the clearest signal of the thesis. Generative Ventures, founded in 2023 and backed by Bertelsmann Investments, invests in what it calls the machine economy, powered by fintech and settled on Web3. Its managing partner, Lex Sokolin, previously served as global fintech co-head at the blockchain software company Consensys. Polygon, a blockchain network, sits alongside it in the syndicate. That makes the round a bet on stablecoins becoming mainstream settlement infrastructure for business payments.
Independent reporting supports that reading. Walapay operates as a Circle partner, supporting the USDC and EURC stablecoins, and uses dollar-pegged tokens within its cross-border flows. The company has cited stablecoin-native settlement as materially cheaper and faster than traditional correspondent banking. Commerce Ventures, the San Francisco firm that previously backed Marqeta, Bill.com and Socure, brings a more conventional payments lens to the table.
What does "owning the full stack" really mean?
Walapay's central claim is that it owns its licensing and banking relationships directly, collapsing a chain of four or five intermediary banks and processors into a single platform it controls. That vertical integration is real and is the company's main differentiator against aggregator-led rivals that lease third-party licences.
The claim is worth scoping, however. Walapay still depends on external providers for critical layers of the stack: stablecoin issuers such as Circle for the digital-dollar leg, specialist custody partners for asset safekeeping, and banking partners for local settlement. The platform is best understood as more deeply integrated than most peers, not fully independent of the financial plumbing beneath it. For buyers assessing concentration risk, the identity and regulatory standing of those underlying partners matters as much as Walapay's own licences.
Where does the stablecoin yield feature meet the GENIUS Act?
The feature most likely to attract scrutiny is Walapay's option to convert a customer's idle deposits into yield-generating digital dollar instruments, with the yield shared back to the customer. That lands directly in the zone US regulators and banks are currently contesting.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, prohibits permitted payment stablecoin issuers and comparable foreign issuers from paying holders any form of interest or yield in connection with holding the coin. As written, the prohibition names issuers, and does not clearly extend to third-party platforms, exchanges or affiliates. In August 2025 a coalition of more than 40 banking associations urged Congress to close that gap, warning that platform-level yield programmes could draw deposits away from traditional banks.
Walapay is not a stablecoin issuer, so a platform-level yield share may sit outside the letter of the current prohibition. It nonetheless operates in precisely the area that pending rulemaking and bank lobbying are targeting. For finance professionals, whether yield-sharing on digital-dollar balances survives the next phase of GENIUS Act implementation is a live question of compliance and product durability, not settled ground.
How big is the opportunity, really?
The announcement frames the prize as a cross-border payments market worth an estimated $190 trillion a year. That figure describes the total value of annual cross-border payment flows, not a revenue pool available to capture, and Walapay's own chief executive has previously described it that way, noting that around 90 per cent of business-to-business flows still move through banks. The structural inefficiency is genuine: cross-border payments remain slow and costly in many emerging markets, where settlement is often stitched together through leased licences and aggregator partners, each adding fees and delay.
That inefficiency is the gap Walapay is targeting, and it is the same thesis drawing capital across the infrastructure layer, from established correspondent-banking incumbents now experimenting with tokenised deposits to a wave of API-first challengers. The open question for each is whether owning more of the stack translates into durable cost and speed advantages once volume scales.
Why this matters to FinanceX readers
For investors and finance teams, the signal in this round is that stablecoin settlement is migrating from the crypto-native edges of the market toward mainstream business-to-business cross-border infrastructure, and that specialist capital is funding the bridge. The watch items are specific: whether Walapay's yield-sharing feature holds up through GENIUS Act rulemaking, whether its vertical-integration claim survives as transaction volume grows, and whether $4.6 million is sufficient runway to expand licensing across Latin America, Africa and Asia against far better-capitalised competitors.
A modest, insider-led seed round is a vote of confidence from people who already know the business, and a reminder that the hardest part of this market, the licences and banking relationships, is also the slowest and most expensive to build.
