Latitude raises $35M to own stablecoin's last mile

A payment is only finished when it lands somewhere the recipient can spend it, and Latitude, a Texas-based payments infrastructure company, builds the piece that comes after the transfer: conversion out of stablecoins and into local currency in a bank account or mobile wallet. Fortune reports the company announced a $35 million Series A on Wednesday, led by Oak HC/FT with participation from NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed Faction, and OpenFX, following an $8 million seed; CEO Cyril Mathew did not disclose a valuation.

Latitude was co-founded by Mathew, Brian Wrightson, and Vivek Morzaria, whose collective resumés include Stripe, Uber, Coinbase, and Meta, and the pitch, as Mathew told Fortune, is aimed at neobanks and other border-crossing businesses that do not want to build local payout rails in dozens of countries themselves. "That neobank can try to do that in 80 countries, or they can plug into Latitude," he said. Beyond neobanks, the customer list extends to payroll platforms, marketplaces, and financial firms.

Mathew's own path to the company runs through the two firms that taught remote payments at scale: during his decade in Europe leading international payments at Uber, a London driver told Mathew how he sent wages to Morocco—cash handed to a middleman, who took 20% off the top before the money arrived. Later, at Stripe, Mathew's team launched stablecoin payouts in 100 countries, but users in Vietnam and across Africa were not adopting the coins; they wanted money they could spend locally and balked at downloading crypto wallets and managing seed phrases. Latitude is the attempt to sell that conversion as a service rather than ask the end user to do it, and the company plans to expand beyond the U.S. by obtaining its own regulatory licenses in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.

The company has a 15-person team, which makes this round less a scale-up than a regulatory war chest. The token settlement layer is growing licensed and crowded — the same terrain this publication has been tracking since Visa's stablecoin settlement search. The durable value is moving to the moment a stablecoin turns into local money, and Latitude is betting that whoever controls the licensed connections at that point controls the customer relationship—the right end of the value chain to own. But the payoff is not a product sprint: for each approval in Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Africa, the calendar is measured in years, and the eventual owner may be Latitude or the larger payments company that decides local licenses are worth buying.