Cyclops raises $20 million to build stablecoin rails for payment firms
Cyclops, a Miami-based stablecoin infrastructure company built for the payments industry, has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Nava Ventures, the company said in a release dated July 15. Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures and Global PayTech Ventures, the firm run by former Mastercard president and founding Adyen investor Javier Perez, also participated.
Kevin Chenault of Nava Ventures joined the Cyclops board as part of the round. “There is no better team equipped to solve this problem,” Chenault said in the release.
The company sells payment processors and networks a single integration for stablecoin services, covering settlement, pay-ins, payouts and treasury functions across global corridors, according to the release. Cyclops said it works with more than 100 licenses across its partners, giving clients regulated options in major markets without assembling the infrastructure themselves.
Founders Alex Wilson, Pat Duffy and David Johnson bring backgrounds from both sides of the business. Wilson and Duffy previously built The Giving Block, a crypto donations platform acquired by Shift4, where the pair went on to run the processor’s crypto and stablecoin division, according to the release. Johnson is an international technology lawyer who designed the company’s licensing strategy.
Cyclops has grown its merchant network to 300,000 and volume has climbed 350 percent month over month, the company said. It employs 31 people and plans to double headcount by the end of the year, with the new capital going toward product development, local teams and licensing, and sales expansion.
The round follows an $8 million seed financing that closed in March, backed by Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime and Shift4 Payments, bringing the company’s total raised to $28 million in roughly four months, Crypto Briefing reported. Fortune, which first reported the Series A, noted that many payment providers still settle over banking infrastructure that closes on weekends, the gap Cyclops says its platform addresses.
