Mesh Looks to Court FinTechs After $1 Billion Valuation

Crypto payments network Mesh is planning to expand its network after raising $75 million.

The new funding round values Mesh at $1 billion, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Jan. 27), and will help the company as it courts FinTech clients in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

“We strongly believe that the future of the economy is tokenized, and this tokenized economy will be heavily fragmented,” Bam Azizi, Mesh’s cofounder and CEO, said in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that businesses and consumers “need something like Mesh that abstracts all of that complexity.”

Mesh raised another $82 million last year to accelerate product development and the expansion of its application programming interfaces (APIs).

The Bloomberg report likened Mesh’s services to that of Plaid. That company helps FinTechs connect to consumer bank accounts, while Mesh works to link platforms with consumer crypto wallets. The startup’s clients include PayPal, which uses Mesh to help merchants accept payments from crypto wallets such as Coinbase and OKX.

Rob Hadick, whose investment group Dragonfly Capital led the round, told Bloomberg that Mesh’s platform sees almost $10 billion in monthly volume.

“Around a year ago, there were a lot of sign-ups happening, but we hadn’t necessarily seen the flow and the amount of volume scale,” Hadick said of the decision to invest in Mesh. “We looked at the volume this year, and it had accelerated tremendously.”

Hadick added that the acceleration in crypto payments follows the passage of the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework regulating stablecoins.

“GENIUS has influenced the way businesses are willing to build their products,” said Hadick. “When they are building better, digitally-native, easy-to-use products then consumers adopt them.”

PYMNTS wrote last week about the ongoing mainstreaming of stablecoins, a trend that was on display at the World Economic Forum’s gathering in Davos, Switzerland.

There several banking and crypto executives detailed how, with tokenization capabilities, costs and settlement times are shrinking and cross-border frictions are easing.

“Stablecoins have emerged as the first proof point for this approach. They demonstrate that tokenized representations of value can circulate globally, settle quickly and maintain sufficient trust to be used repeatedly,” PYMNTS wrote. “But even here, enthusiasm is tempered by realism. Without regulatory guardrails and credible public anchors, private digital money risks fragmenting monetary sovereignty rather than modernizing it.”

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