Velocity just raised $38 million to make stablecoins look less like a crypto trade and more like ordinary business payment plumbing.
The London fintech announced a $38 million Series A, according to a Fortune report that broke the news first. Dragonfly Capital led the round, with Coinbase Ventures, Capital One Ventures and Wintermute joining in. That lineup tells you something. A crypto-native venture fund, Coinbase's corporate venture arm, the investment arm of a major U.S. bank and a crypto market maker are all backing the same bet.
Velocity builds the plumbing that lets businesses move money globally using stablecoins while still working inside their existing fiat accounting and banking relationships. Think of it as a treasury layer for CFOs, not traders. A company can hold, send and receive dollar-pegged tokens across multiple blockchains and payment corridors without rebuilding its finance stack around crypto. The company already operates in the United States, parts of Europe and Australia.
Eric Queathem founded Velocity in 2025 after nine years at Worldpay, where he led corporate strategy and acquisitions before starting the company's crypto and global payouts division. That background matters. Velocity isn't selling businesses on crypto as an ideology. It's selling faster settlement and cheaper cross-border transfers, the same problems Worldpay spent decades trying to solve through correspondent banking.
A Pattern, Not a One-Off
This is Velocity's second raise in a little over a year. Fuel Ventures and other backers put in roughly $10 million in a pre-seed round last year, one some outlets called among Europe's largest, funding the company's exit from stealth. Raising nearly four times that a year later, with a bank's venture arm and a major exchange both at the table, tells you where serious stablecoin money is moving next. Not toward another trading venue. Toward B2B payments that finance teams can actually audit.
Dragonfly's fingerprints are all over this corner of the market. The same firm led a $16 million seed round in stablecoin issuer Codex alongside Coinbase Ventures and Circle last year, and led a $36 million Series A in payments platform Conduit. Velocity is now another stablecoin infrastructure bet in Dragonfly's portfolio, which makes this look less like opportunistic crypto investing and more like a firm-wide thesis.
You should sit with that. Plenty of coverage this year has focused on slower stablecoin market growth and on banks lobbying against expanded stablecoin rules in Washington. Velocity's raise cuts the other way. Venture firms are still funding the picks and shovels of stablecoin infrastructure even as the speculative trading story has cooled, and one of those backers is tied to a bank. The headlines say one thing. The capital says another.
The Licensing Work Is the Hard Part
Velocity plans to use the new capital to pursue the money transmitter and payments licenses it needs to expand into Africa and Latin America, two regions where local currency volatility makes dollar-pegged settlement useful rather than merely convenient. The company also intends to build out secure custody infrastructure and launch yield-generating stablecoin products, giving corporate treasury teams a way to earn a return on balances they would otherwise leave sitting in a business account.
None of this works without licensing. And licensing is slow. Getting approved as a money transmitter in a single U.S. state can take months. Doing it across dozens of jurisdictions in Africa and Latin America, each with its own central bank and rulebook, is a multi-year undertaking, not a product launch dressed up as expansion.
Frankly, that is the part of the story worth watching. Stablecoin infrastructure companies can talk about instant settlement all they like, but businesses don't run on speed alone. They run on reconciled books, legal payment flows, custody controls and auditors who can trace where the money went. If Velocity can make stablecoin payments boring enough for that crowd, it has a real business.
Still, the wager behind Velocity's raise is simple. Businesses already send stablecoins somewhere in their supply chain, even if their finance team hasn't noticed yet. Someone has to build the accounting, custody and compliance layer that makes those flows legal and auditable. Velocity is betting that whoever wins that infrastructure race ends up running the more durable company. Not whoever trades the most stablecoins.
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