Visa, Circle and Ripple put $10 million into the back end

Velocity raised another $10 million from Visa, Circle and Ripple, an extension that lifts its Series A to $48 million and values the London payments-infrastructure firm at $200 million post-money, chief executive Eric Queathem told CoinDesk. The July round, already oversubscribed at $38 million, drew Haun Ventures, Translink Capital and Mirana Ventures into the extension alongside the three strategics.

What Velocity sells is narrower than the usual stablecoin pitch, which is reason enough for a card network and two crypto issuers to buy in. Payment companies and banks can put stablecoins to work for settlement, liquidity and treasury operations without replacing the systems they already run, and the company does not see stablecoins replacing cards, CoinDesk reports. Rubail Birwadker, Visa's global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, said stablecoins are playing an increasingly important role in how value moves across the Visa ecosystem, while chief growth officer Matt Larson expects customers will not all migrate to stablecoin wallets; the funding and settlement moving around card networks is the piece that could shift.

The market underneath has outgrown its first use. Stablecoins have passed $300 billion in circulation and moved from traders shifting dollars between exchanges into payments, cross-border transfers and corporate treasury work. Queathem, who previously worked at Worldpay, which settles more than $2 trillion in annual payments volume, argues that 15 years of payments investment went into the consumer-facing experience while nobody fixed the back end, and he expects global companies to eventually keep at least some of their capital onchain.

Each of the three has a different reason to be on the cap table. Circle is on both sides of the trade, with DAD's records showing a $400 million deal announced Sept. 10, and as this publication has argued, the stablecoin payout layer is a licensing business of licences, audits and local scheme connections, the ground next to the retrofit Velocity sells, which lets a bank keep its core systems while the money underneath changes. Ripple's bank channel is the same wager from the other end: Jeonbuk Bank became the first Korean regional bank to run Ripple Payments, its third Korean institutional deal of 2026. Visa sits closest to the volume, since settlement behind cards is the business most reshaped if the retrofit holds.

Read the $200 million mark as a strategic-option price. Ten million dollars buys visibility when the alternative is building the same plumbing three times over, and the mark only looks cheap if routing follows: Visa pointing settlement at a stack its clients already run, or Circle's Arc, which targets Sept. 16 for opening its production blockchain to any user with eleven founding institutions still controlling block production, carrying the payment firms Velocity has taught to keep their core systems intact. Queathem's case is that the back end is where the next decade of payments value accrues, and three companies that own the front end have now bought positions at a price that assumes he is right. Arc opens that day, and the eleven founding institutions that still control block production will find out whether the payment firms Velocity has taught actually carry the volume.