HIFI raises $37m to take its stablecoin rails into repo and cards
HIFI's $37m Series A, led by Left Lane Capital, funds licences so more of its stablecoin stack runs outside Cross River Bank, the partner now competing with it.
HIFI, a New York stablecoin infrastructure company, has closed a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. It says it will use part of the money to get licences so that "more of the stack runs under HIFI directly". That line is the story. HIFI runs as a money services business (MSB) on another firm's bank charter. The bank behind that charter, Cross River, is building the same kind of embedded-finance business itself. HIFI's landlord is becoming its competitor.
HIFI co-founder and CEO Zach Walsh announced the raise on September 24, 2026 in a post on HIFI's blog. Matt Miller of Left Lane joins the board. The post names no other investors and gives no valuation.
What the HIFI Series A is paying for
In the same post, Walsh says HIFI "now processes more than $7 billion a year". He adds that usage among existing customers "has grown more than fourfold over the past six months". Companies building on HIFI have onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals between them. HIFI's press release on NewMediaWire calls the $7 billion "annualized volume" and says HIFI can pay out in 87 countries.
The money goes three ways: more regulatory licences, hiring in New York and a few international markets, and a push from payments into cards and capital markets.
On capital markets, the detail is HIFI's own. Its blog says HIFI's platform was part of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) tokenised repo pilot in July. The press release describes the same work as DTCC's July production trades using DTC-tokenised assets, alongside BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Nasdaq. HIFI also says it supported a live tokenised repo trade on Tradeweb between DRW and Marex. That trade settled on the Canton Network, with USDCx as the cash leg. See our coverage of DTCC's tokenisation launch and its no-action clock.
The Cross River problem
The footer on HIFI's homepage says it is "not a bank" and that "banking and payment services are provided by Cross River Bank, Member FDIC". The same page calls HIFI "a registered MSB with principal-agent bank partnerships". HIFI does not hold its own charter, so its main compliance protection is borrowed from Cross River.
Cross River is moving deeper into the same market. When it raised $50 million of common equity on March 31, Chairman, Founder and CEO Gilles Gade described its plan as "embedded finance 2.0, the bundling of crypto, lending, payments, and cards on one platform". That list covers almost all of HIFI's roadmap. We reported in August that Cross River had committed about $400 million of its own balance sheet to embedded-finance lenders in 10 weeks. A sponsor bank selling that bundle is no longer a neutral utility for the platforms built on it.
Other stablecoin firms have already moved. In December 2025 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) conditionally approved national trust bank charters for Ripple, First National Digital Currency Bank, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos. A federal route to holding custody under your own licence now exists.
Why brokers and prop firms should care
This month HIFI launched stablecoin push-to-card payouts through Visa Direct. According to its product page, the service lets eligible US businesses "push stablecoin funds instantly to eligible Visa debit or credit cards worldwide". For a prop firm paying traders in dozens of countries, or a broker handling withdrawals, that could replace a slow wire with a card credit. Card rails are already competitive, as the JP Morgan Payments and Thunes cross-border payout push shows.
Before signing up, a payments team should ask who carries the compliance risk. Today, when a payout runs through HIFI, it runs under Cross River's charter and oversight. If HIFI moves more of the stack under its own licences, that risk moves too. So would the contracts, and who handles an account freeze. Operators should find out which entity is the regulated counterparty for every payout corridor they use.
In its own statement in the press release, Left Lane Managing Partner Matthew Miller called HIFI "a foundational platform for the next generation of financial applications". We found no public comment from Cross River on the raise, and HIFI has not named the licences it will seek.
What happens next
Our prediction: within 12 months, HIFI either announces a set of state money-transmitter licences or files for a trust charter. Why: The company has said in writing that licences are the first use of the money. Its bank partner now sells a competing bundle. And the OCC's December 2025 approvals show a trust charter is achievable for a stablecoin infrastructure firm. If neither filing appears by September 2027, HIFI will have decided that relying on Cross River is cheaper than competing with it. More on the Fintech desk.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 29 September 2026, 19:44 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011.
