Yellow Card said it raised $40 million in strategic equity funding to expand its stablecoin payment infrastructure offering, betting that banks will increasingly use blockchain technology to move dollars across borders.
The round included SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital and Blockchain Capital. It brings Yellow Card’s total equity financing to more than $120 million at a valuation significantly higher than the $200 million it rated in 2022, but not yet $1 billion, one person close to the matter told CoinDesk.
Neither Yellow Card CEO Chris Maurice nor the U.S.-based company’s PR team confirmed the valuation.
Maurice, who co-founded the firm, said the company is working with commercial banks globally to use stablecoins to bring more dollars into markets and replace legacy payment systems.
“The very near future state for this industry is one where payments flow directly between banks onchain, without B2B payments companies or other payment service companies in the flow at all,” Maurice said over Telegram.
Maurice, a former Pokémon card seller, told CoinDesk in a 2024 podcast interview that he and Justin Poiroux, the firm’s chief technology officer, founded Yellow Card to take on big banks and Swift, the interbank service that processes over 53 million secure messaging instructions a day for nearly 11,500 financial institutions. Swift facilitates trillions of dollars in global bank transactions and said last month it was testing its first blockchain ledger.
Yellow Card, which focuses mostly on emerging markets, will use the new capital to expand Global USD Accounts, its dollar account product for businesses, and add stablecoin and local payment mechanisms in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
The accounts allow businesses to hold dollars, hold and swap stablecoins, manage treasury operations and collect or disburse local currencies through domestic payment rails in more than 50 countries, Yellow Card said.
Maurice said the company’s flows have historically been split roughly evenly between corporates and large financial institutions using its treasury-management and payments infrastructure. Bank volumes are now growing faster as large institutions adopt the company’s system, he said.
Yellow Card kicked off its operations in Africa, said Maurice, where it built operations across fragmented country-by-country regulatory jurisdictions. The firm said that since its founding in 2016, it has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions and holds licenses, authorizations or registrations in 22 jurisdictions.