Weekly update #122

Welcome to this edition of the weekly newsletter. The idea behind this is to gather all the information in the startup ecosystem in one place, with a special focus on the fintech market and the VC industry.

The latest episode of Builders has been released this week! In this episode, I sit down with Lucrezia Lucotti, partner at 360 Capital. You can find the full episodes here on YouTube, or here on Spotify and here on Apple Podcast.

Lucrezia Lucotti is Partner at 360 Capital, where she focuses on Italian and Southern European dealflow across B2B and B2C software, deeptech and climate tech ventures. She oversees investments and portfolio management across the firm’s 360 Deeptech, Climate Tech and Series A funds, following a progression from Analyst to Investment Director before being appointed Partner in January 2024.

Over the past five years at 360 Capital, Lucrezia has built a strong track record in sourcing, executing and managing early and growth stage investments. Prior to venture capital, she worked at Roland Berger as a Business Analyst on due diligences and industrial plans across financial services, pharma and industrial machinery, and gained experience at Gartner and Accenture in consulting roles spanning TMT and financial services, including the design of a new internet banking experience for SMEs

A Bocconi graduate with a double degree from WU Vienna, Lucrezia combines analytical rigor with a deep interest in innovation and entrepreneurship, and has also served as Ambassador for Female Founders, supporting the next generation of European entrepreneurs.

Coming back to us, this week I’ve been reading a very interesting report, the “Stablecoins in payments: What the raw transaction numbers miss” from McKinsey & Company. The study, made in partnership with Artemis Analytics, is a deep analysis of the impact of stablecoins in different money flows, from consumer to businesses, including volumes and trends over time. Here my main takeaways:

The stablecoin market has expanded rapidly, with circulating supply surpassing $300 billion, compared with less than $30 billion in 2020. Forecasts suggest strong continued growth, with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stating that supply could reach $3 trillion by 2030, while major financial institutions estimate a range between $2 trillion and $4 trillion. This outlook has intensified interest from financial institutions exploring stablecoins for payment and settlement use cases. Current adoption remains limited relative to global payment volumes.

Stablecoins process about $90 billion annually in global payroll and remittances, less than 1 percent of a market exceeding $100 trillion. In B2B payments, stablecoin volumes reach approximately $226 billion annually, representing around 0.01 percent of the $1.6 quadrillion global market. In capital markets, roughly $8 billion in settlements use stablecoins each year, a very small share of the $200 trillion global settlement landscape.

Stablecoins are gaining traction in payment ecosystems where they provide clear operational advantages, particularly faster settlement, improved liquidity management, and reduced friction in cross border transfers. International peer to peer payments can be executed almost instantly and at lower cost than traditional remittance channels. Their practical usability is also expanding through stablecoin linked cards that allow users to spend digital dollar balances directly with merchants. Spending through these cards reached about $4.5 billion in 2025, a 673 percent increase from 2024.

B2B payments represent the main driver of growth, accounting for roughly $226 billion or about 60 percent of global stablecoin payment volumes, with activity rising 733 percent year over year. Geographically, adoption remains concentrated in Asia, which generates around $245 billion in payment flows, followed by North America with $95 billion and Europe with $50 billion. Financial institutions are therefore encouraged to analyze on chain data carefully, build strategies based on realistic adoption patterns and regulatory constraints, and pursue targeted investments in high growth use cases while developing infrastructure capable of scaling as the market matures.

The launch of Bitcoin in 2009 marked obviously a major shift by introducing a decentralized blockchain ledger and a widely traded currency operating outside the control of sovereign monetary authorities. Since then, thousands of cryptocurrencies have emerged, generating billions of dollars in daily transaction volume and reaching a combined market value exceeding $2 trillion. However, their usefulness as a payment instrument has been limited by strong price volatility, correlation with Bitcoin, and slower transaction confirmations.

Stablecoins were developed to address these issues by linking their value to underlying assets such as fiat currencies, government securities, or commodities. Issued on faster blockchain networks and supported by liquid reserves, stablecoins aim to provide greater stability for payments and settlements, with nearly $3 trillion in transactions recorded in the first half of 2021 alone.

But let’s take a closer look at the main news of the last seven days. Revolut applied for a US bank charter license, Crypto.com obtained a financial institution license in EU, Nubank acquired the naming rights on Inter Miami CF new stadium and Kraken became the first crypto company with a master account at the Federal Reserve System. But also, FLOWPAY acquired Tapline, BitGo expands crypto-as-a-service product in EEA, Santander and Mastercard executed the first AI agent payments live, and PayPal launched PYUSDx with MoonPay and M0. Some very interesting new funds, including a $50M commitment from European Investment Fund (EIF) to Join Capital GmbH, a $40M fund I from GHARAGE and a $25M fund II from FIRSTPICK. And finally, some very interesting funding rounds from fintech startups like Pluvo, Ualá, Rent2Cash, Diligent AI, DivTax, Dots, and many others.

Let’s take a closer look:

Rounds

• Dots raises $8.9M Series A to modernize global payout infrastructure
• Fido Ghana secures $5.5M debt from Symbiotics to scale AI driven lending
• Pluvo raises $5M seed to bring agentic AI to CFO decision making
• DivTax secures €1M pre seed to digitise cross border withholding tax reclaims
• ivee raises $1M seed to tackle AI adoption gap in the workforce
• Kobalt Labs secures $12.7M to automate fintech compliance with AI agents
• Oxus Finance raises $2.4M to scale AI driven stablecoin payments globally
• Wealthyhood secures €6M from Bank of Cyprus to scale across Europe
• Diligent AI raises $2.5M to deploy autonomous AI analysts for AML and KYC
• Payr secures $2.1M seed to bring credit card payments to UK rent market
• Taurex secures $40M series C to expand global brokerage and build AI driven trading platform
• Ualá raises $195M round led by Allianz X, valuing the Latam fintech at $3.2B
• YouLend secures $225M facility from Värde Partners to expand US embedded lending
• Silverflow raises $40M Series B to expand global cloud native payment processing infrastructure
• Vivox AI raises £1.3M to deploy regulator ready AI agents for financial crime compliance
• Rent2Cash secures €100M funding to expand rental advance platform across Europe
• ARQ raises $70M from Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund to expand stablecoin financial platform
• RenoFi raises $22M Series B to scale AI driven renovation financing platform
• Peppermint Innovation Limited secures A$2.1M strategic investment to expand digital payments in the Philippines
• QFEX launches with $9.5M Seed round to introduce 24/7 trading for traditional assets

VC funds

• European Investment Fund (EIF) commits €50M to Join Capital GmbH fund III to back Europe’s defence and space startups
• GHARAGE launches €40M fund I to back travel tech innovation across Europe and Asia
• FIRSTPICK launches €25M Fund II to back overlooked Baltic founders

News on the market

• MoonPay, M0 and PayPal launch PYUSDx to power application specific stablecoins
• FundBank acquires Trrue chain in €10M deal to expand European crypto capabilities
• Visa to be anchor investor in PayPay Corporation’s $14B Nasdaq IPO
• Crypto.com secures limited financial institution license in Europe to reinforce stablecoin operations
• Wero expands to Belgian ecommerce as EPI Company accelerates European payments ambition
• Revolut Business launches Titan Visa to challenge American Express in corporate cards
• Ripple expands Ripple Payments into full stack stablecoin infrastructure
• Pine Labs to roll out stablecoin prepaid card in nine markets
• J. Safra Sarasin completes €1.1B Saxo Bank acquisition
• Payoneer applies for US national trust bank to power stablecoin infrastructure
• FLOWPAY acquires Tapline to expand revenue based financing across Europe
• Santander and Mastercard execute Europe’s first live AI agent payment
• Nubank and Inter Miami CF sign multiyear partnership for stadium naming
• Kraken Financial becomes first digital asset bank to secure Federal Reserve System master account
• Visa and Bridge expand stablecoin card program across 100+ countries
• Revolut applies for US bank charter as they push global banking ambitions
• SoFi and Mastercard partner to enable stablecoin settlement with SoFiUSD across global payments network
• BitGo expands Crypto-as-a-Service across the EEA under MiCAR framework
• Paysend and Nodu launch global stablecoin off ramp across 62 countries
• WeChat Pay HK joins cross border payment connect with HSBC for real time mainland transfers

And here some useful resources for everyone involved in the ecosystem:

Events you don’t want to miss

• FIBE | Berlin - 15th-16th April 2026 (Link here)
• Stablecon EMEA | Amsterdam - 19th-20th May (Link here)

You have a cool event you want to mention or to sponsor? Feel free to send me a DM.

Founders to watch in fintech

I also wanted to start shining a light on the most interesting fintech founders out there, so I thought to start sharing how I look for ideas to invest on. Every week, I will start sharing the most interesting founders in fintech, divided per area.

This week we take a look at the most interesting Indian founders in fintech.

I usually use Spectre to scout for new ideas, the team is great and they also give me a free account once they learned I was a fan of the product. So if you wanna take a look at it, you can find it here.

New funds

I recently spoke with Marco Scotti from Raspberry Ventures. Thanks to their Y Combinator Alumni network, they unlock access to the top 10% of YC companies for Angel investors. Co-investing up to $3M across 15 - 25 companies in each YC batch, 4 batches a year, before Demo Day; and before the Silicon Valley VCs come in and take allocations in the best companies.

Their next batch YC W26m is closing in the upcoming weeks. You can take a look here if you are interested!

Take also a look at the last edition of the newsletter, Weekly update #121.