HIFI raises $37M Series A to build the infrastructure for tokenized money
Today we're announcing that HIFI has raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital.
We chose Left Lane because they back entrepreneurs who take on hard problems in complex markets, and they pair that conviction with real operating support, working alongside founders on the decisions that matter most as a company scales. Matt Miller joins our board as part of the round, and we're grateful to have him and the Left Lane team with us for what comes next.
Before getting into where we're going, I want to share what we believe and what we've built so far.
Money is becoming software
For most of their history, stablecoins were a tool for crypto markets, mainly a way to hold dollars between trades. Over the past two years, that has changed considerably. Stablecoins are becoming money in their own right: a dollar that can move anywhere in the world in seconds, settle at any hour, and be written directly into software. Businesses are using them to pay suppliers and contractors, treasurers are using them to manage cash, and institutions are beginning to use them to settle obligations with one another. More than a quarter of a trillion dollars now circulates in this form, and the GENIUS Act gave payment stablecoins a federal legal framework in July 2025.
We think the more important change is still ahead. Dollars are only the first asset to be tokenized, and Treasuries, money market funds, receivables, credit, and eventually most securities are likely to follow. When cash and assets exist in the same programmable form, they can interact directly, without a chain of institutions exchanging messages and reconciling records afterward. A company's cash can earn yield over a weekend and still be available for Monday's payroll. Collateral can be pledged, substituted, and returned within a single trading session. A loan can be repaid and its lien released in the same transaction. None of these are new financial ideas, but each has historically required enough coordination and delay that it was available only to the largest institutions, and only during business hours. Tokenization makes them cheaper to offer and available to far more people.
In 1968, the New York Stock Exchange closed on Wednesdays because trading volume had outgrown the back offices processing it, and firms needed a day each week to catch up on paperwork. The problem was ultimately solved not by trading faster, but by rebuilding the infrastructure underneath trading. Stock certificates were immobilized in a central depository, which later became part of DTCC, and securities began moving as ledger entries rather than paper.
We are at a similar point now. The ledger for tokenized money runs continuously, but very little of the infrastructure around it was built with that in mind.
What we've built
Mo Afifi and I started HIFI in New York in 2022 to build that missing infrastructure. Companies use HIFI to create entirely new financial products using stablecoins and tokenized money.
HIFI now processes more than $7 billion a year, and usage among our existing customers has grown more than fourfold over the past six months. Together, the companies building on HIFI have onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals.
Some of our most instructive work has been with institutions. In July, HIFI's platform was part of DTCC's pilot for tokenized repo, which, given the history above, felt like a fitting place to be. We also supported a live tokenized repo trade on Tradeweb between DRW and Marex, settled on the Canton Network with USDCx as the cash leg. For payments, developers can pair HIFI's stablecoin settlement with Visa Direct, including the stablecoin push-to-card payouts we launched this month, and we've integrated with the Circle Payments Network to give our customers more ways to settle.
What comes next
We'll use this round in three ways. We plan to obtain additional regulatory licenses so that more of the stack runs under HIFI directly. We'll grow our team in New York and in a small number of international markets. And we'll extend the product from payments into cards and capital markets, where the unsolved problems, particularly around custody and control, are both the hardest and the most valuable to solve.
We don't think every one of those problems needs to be solved before institutions start moving. The companies that make the most progress will likely be the ones that begin where tokenized money already works, such as payments, treasury, and collateral, and build outward from there. That is how we have approached HIFI so far, and it's how we intend to keep going.
Most of what finance will look like on these rails hasn't been built yet. We're grateful to our customers, our team, and our investors for their part in getting HIFI this far. If you'd like to work on what comes next, we're hiring across engineering, compliance, and go-to-market.
Read the exclusive in Axios: https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2026/09/24/hifi-stablecoin-payments-37m-funding
Read our press release: https://www.newmediawire.com/news/hifi-raises-37-million-to-build-tokenized-financial-infrastructure-as-wall-street-moves-onchain-7090000
