Yellow Card Raises $40 Million to Push Stablecoin Rails Into Commercial Banking

Yellow Card has closed a $40 million strategic equity round, bringing its total equity financing past $120 million and lifting its valuation above the $200 million mark it achieved in 2022, though still short of a billion dollars. The round was led by SC Ventures (Standard Chartered‘s venture arm), Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, and Blockchain Capital, a combination that signals institutional interest in stablecoin infrastructure as a serious challenger to legacy correspondent-banking rails.

The Africa-founded, US-based company is positioning itself as the plumbing for bank-to-bank onchain dollar flows, working directly with commercial banks worldwide to move money across borders via stablecoins. Chief executive Chris Maurice, who co-founded the firm with CTO Justin Poiroux, said the near-term trajectory for the industry is one where payments settle directly between banks on-chain, removing intermediary payment-service providers from the flow entirely. That framing places Yellow Card in direct competition with Swift, which processes more than 53 million secure messaging instructions daily for nearly 11,500 financial institutions and is itself now testing a blockchain ledger.

New capital will be deployed into expanding Global USD Accounts, the company’s dollar-denominated product for businesses that supports stablecoin swaps, treasury management, and local-currency disbursement across more than 50 countries, and into adding stablecoin and local payment options across Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Maurice noted that bank volumes are now growing faster than corporate volumes within Yellow Card’s book, a shift that suggests its institutional pipeline is accelerating beyond its original emerging-market retail base. Since founding in 2016, the company has processed more than $10 billion in transactions and holds licences, authorisations, or registrations across 22 jurisdictions.