Noah Raises $38m to Expand Stablecoin Cross-Border Payments
Noah, the London-based infrastructure provider for stablecoin cross-border payments, has closed its seed round at $38 million after adding a $16 million extension from new and existing backers. The top-up builds on the $22 million the company raised in June 2025, and it arrives with a credibility marker that sets Noah apart in a crowded field: co-founder and president Thijn Lamers was part of the early team at Adyen, the Dutch payments group now valued in the tens of billions. The capital is earmarked for regulatory licences, engineering and compliance hires, deeper local payment-rail connections, and a New York office to push into the United States.
What exactly did Noah raise, and who backed it?
The $16 million extension lifts Noah's total seed funding to $38 million. Endeit Capital, FJ Labs, LocalGlobe, Felix Capital and a group of angel investors took part. LocalGlobe led the original $22 million tranche in mid-2025.
Noah reports that year-to-date 2026 revenues are up 538% on the same period in 2025, with recurring month-on-month growth of 31%, and that it signed more than 150 new customers across remittances, fintech, marketplaces and payroll during the year. Those growth figures are company-stated and not independently audited, and the press release does not name the enterprise customers it references, so the headline traction should be read as Noah's own account pending confirmation.
Jonne de Leeuw, the Endeit partner who leads the firm's fintech investments, framed the deal as a bet on a category leader, arguing that cross-border payments still run on rails built decades ago and that customer demand for a faster alternative is now visible in Noah's numbers.
Why does the founding team matter here?
Stablecoin infrastructure is no longer a thin field. What distinguishes Noah is less the technology than the payments pedigree behind it. Lamers co-founded Noah in 2020 alongside chief executive Shah Ramezani, and the company's early backing included angels drawn from the upper ranks of fintech, among them a former Adyen chief technology officer. For finance professionals assessing which stablecoin entrants can clear the compliance and banking-connectivity bar, an operator who helped scale one of Europe's largest payment processors is a signal worth weighing.
Ramezani has described Noah's ambition as replacing slow and costly correspondent banking with a single settlement platform, with compliance built in at both the origination and destination of funds. Lamers has set a near-term target of scaling the business to support four to five times its current revenue over the next 12 months.
How big is the stablecoin cross-border payments opportunity?
The addressable market is substantial. According to FXC Intelligence, the total value of cross-border payment flows reached $208 trillion in 2025. Business payments from small and medium-sized firms account for a modest share of that flow but a disproportionate share of industry revenue, and they remain among the most expensive transactions to process, a pain point that stablecoin settlement is designed to attack.
Adoption is accelerating from a low base. A February 2026 analysis by McKinsey and Artemis Analytics put annualised business-to-business stablecoin payments at $226 billion, a 733% year-on-year increase and the single largest category of real-world stablecoin payment activity. Even so, that analysis found real stablecoin payments at roughly $390 billion in total, well under 1% of global cross-border volumes. The gap between headline stablecoin transaction figures in the tens of trillions and genuine payment usage in the hundreds of billions is precisely the territory Noah is targeting.
Where does Noah sit in a crowded market?
The competitive set is formidable. Stripe moved into the space with its $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, while incumbents Visa and Mastercard are each building stablecoin settlement strategies of their own. A cluster of crypto-native startups is chasing the same corridors.
Noah's answer is reach and regulation. The company says it is live in more than 150 markets and supports over 60 currencies, connecting stablecoin settlement to local payment rails so that funds move without the multi-step correspondent chains that add delay and cost. It sells both directly to enterprises and indirectly through consumer platforms, neobanks and workforce platforms that aggregate large numbers of end users.
Whether regulatory footprint, rather than the underlying technology, proves to be the durable advantage is the question the next funding round will test.
What will the money pay for?
The funding is directed at four areas: expanding Noah's regulatory licences, recruiting engineering and compliance specialists, deepening connections with local payment rails in its highest-volume markets, and opening a New York office to accelerate US expansion. The emphasis on licences and compliance hires, rather than pure product development, reflects where the real friction in cross-border stablecoin payments now sits.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
For banks, fintechs and payment providers, Noah's raise is another data point in a clear shift: the cross-border payments revenue pool that intermediaries have relied on for decades is being targeted by settlement rails that are faster and cheaper. The signal for investors is in the mix of the story. B2B stablecoin flows grew 733% in a year yet still sit below 1% of cross-border volume, which means the runway is long and the winners are not yet decided.
The competitive edge in this category increasingly turns on licences and banking connectivity, the parts that are hardest to replicate and slowest to build, which is exactly where Noah is spending. For finance teams weighing build-versus-buy decisions on international money movement, the open question has shifted from whether stablecoin settlement works to which infrastructure provider will still be standing when the volume arrives.
