Cyclops Raises $28 Million in Four Months: What Attracts Coinbase and Circle to Invest?

How does a startup team emerging from a major payment company reconstruct the stablecoin payment sector with differentiation?

Written by: Grok, Doubao

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

On July 15, 2026, stablecoin payment infrastructure company Cyclops officially announced the completion of a $20 million Series A financing round, led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and Global PayTech Ventures. Following this round of financing, Kevin Chenault, a partner at Nava Ventures, joined the company's board of directors.

This Series A financing comes just about four months after Cyclops completed an $8 million seed round in March 2026, which was led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from F-Prime and Shift4 Payments. In total, Cyclops has raised $28 million in less than six months, all through equity financing.

Cyclops is headquartered in Miami, Florida, with an overseas office in Vienna, Austria. The company positions itself as a stablecoin infrastructure service provider focused on serving the payment industry, offering integrated stablecoin technology solutions to payment service providers (PSPs), acquirers, and payment processors.

According to official disclosures, the platform's cumulative transaction volume has exceeded $2 billion, covering 150 countries, holding over 100 relevant compliance licenses globally, and expanding its merchant network to 300,000, with a recent month-on-month transaction volume growth rate of 350%.

Source: Cyclops

Team Background: Payment Veterans Start Again

The core team of Cyclops consists of seasoned professionals from the payment and cryptocurrency industries. The three co-founders previously co-founded The Giving Block, a crypto donation platform focused on non-profit organizations, which was acquired by payment company Shift4 Payments in 2022. After the acquisition, the three led the crypto and stablecoin business unit within Shift4.

• Alex Wilson: Co-founder and Co-CEO, has been building crypto and stablecoin infrastructure since 2018. During his tenure as head of crypto at Shift4, he led the acceptance, settlement, and payment product development for merchants.
• Pat Duffy: Co-founder and Co-CEO, co-founded The Giving Block with Wilson, and jointly led the crypto and stablecoin department after the Shift4 acquisition.
• David Johnson: Co-founder and President, with a background as an international technology lawyer, responsible for Cyclops's global licensing architecture and compliance strategy design.

From left to right: David Johnson, Alex Wilson, and Pat Duffy, Source: Cyclops

Other key members include Lindsay Wysocki (COO), Dan Savitt (Chief Compliance Officer for the U.S., former Global Chief Compliance Officer at Coinbase), and Willy Bardiot (Product Director). The company continues to recruit talent from institutions like Coinbase, Fiserv, and JPMorgan. By the time of the Series A financing, the Cyclops team had grown to 31 employees and plans to double its size by the end of the year.

Cyclops Team, Source: Cyclops

Pain Points and Technical Solutions

Stablecoins enable 24/7 instant settlement at costs far lower than traditional cross-border payment channels. According to DefiLlama data, since 2024, the market capitalization of stablecoins has grown by 137%, nearing $310 billion. The GENIUS Act signed in July 2025 provides a federal regulatory framework for stablecoin issuance in the U.S., transitioning stablecoins from being "optional" to a "necessity" for payment companies.

However, payment companies face significant technical fragmentation issues when adopting stablecoins. The founding team's firsthand experience at Shift4 is a typical case: each new stablecoin capability requires separate integration with multiple external providers for custody, KYC/AML, liquidity, blockchain nodes, etc., each with its own API, compliance requirements, and SLAs, leading to engineering cycles of several months. Accumulating technical debt, slow deployment, and compounded compliance risks made the team realize that fragmented infrastructure had become the core bottleneck for the payment industry's adoption of stablecoins, leading them to leave Shift4 and establish Cyclops in 2025.

Cyclops's core goal is to provide a one-stop stablecoin infrastructure for payment companies, allowing PSPs to offer related services to merchants without having to build or maintain blockchain components themselves or become crypto companies.

One-Stop Access

Cyclops achieves integration through low-code/no-code solutions and a single API, covering stablecoin and fiat settlement, payment inflows, outflows, and fund management. Payment companies only need to call one interface, and Cyclops automatically completes cross-chain routing, liquidity scheduling, compliance checks, and fault tolerance in the background. According to Fortune, Cyclops's platform can reduce the onboarding time for payment companies from months or even years to weeks.

Solana-Priority Settlement Network

Cyclops has chosen Solana as its preferred settlement network. Solana can process thousands of transactions per second, with sub-second finality and extremely low transaction fees. According to Solana Foundation data, the stablecoin ecosystem on Solana expanded from about $1.83 billion in early 2025 to $9.3 billion in the third quarter of 2025. The platform also continues to connect with other public chains like Ethereum to expand low-cost on-chain settlement channel options.

Compliance Architecture

Co-founder David Johnson designed Cyclops's global licensing architecture, covering over 100 licensed jurisdictions through dozens of partners. The company has initiated licensing processes in the U.S. and Europe, including obtaining money transmission licenses in various states and submitting MiCA applications in Austria. Chief Compliance Officer Dan Savitt's regulatory background further strengthens the company's compliance capabilities.

Function Customization for the Payment Industry

Unlike general-purpose crypto infrastructure aimed at developers, Cyclops's functions are specifically designed for the operational methods of payment processors, including settlement reconciliation, merchant onboarding workflows, and integration with existing POS devices and payment systems. The platform supports over 400 digital assets and covers more than 150 countries.

Consumers continue to swipe their cards for payment, with front-end processes unchanged; at the end of the day, Cyclops converts the settlement funds into USDC stablecoins and directly issues them to the merchant's wallet, eliminating the traditional bank's 1-3 day settlement delay and achieving rapid returns around the clock. Source: X

Project Progress: From Commercial Launch to Client Implementation

Cyclops completed an $8 million seed round in March 2026 and officially launched commercial operations.

On the client side, the currently disclosed core clients include Shift4 Payments and Mastercard, both collaborating on stablecoin settlement products. Shift4 is also an investor in Cyclops's seed round, and the over 300,000 merchants it serves form Cyclops's potential customer base. Additionally, the platform has supported companies like Blade Helicopter and Blue Origin in achieving stablecoin settlements around the clock.

In terms of market expansion, the company is currently prioritizing deepening its presence in North America and the EU, leveraging existing compliance licenses to solidify its foothold in these regions; in the medium to long term, it aims to focus on cross-border trade payment sectors in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Regarding operational data, since the commercial launch, the platform's transaction volume has grown by 350% month-on-month. The platform continues to connect with public chains like Ethereum and Solana to expand low-cost on-chain settlement channel options.

Competitive Landscape: Differentiated Positioning in a Vertical Market

Currently, participants in the stablecoin B2B infrastructure sector can be divided into three main categories, with Cyclops having clear differentiated characteristics:

• Comprehensive crypto financial infrastructure (e.g., ZeroHash, BVNK). Advantages: Broader product lines covering brokerage, custody, and exchange; Disadvantages: Generic products serving various clients like exchanges, asset management, and payments, lacking deep customization for the payment industry, leading to significant integration and modification workloads.
• Stablecoin issuer-affiliated B2B solutions (e.g., Circle's B2B payment infrastructure product line Circle Payments). Advantages: Native USDC deep integration; Disadvantages: Dependency on a single stablecoin, limited support for other types of stablecoins, insufficient neutrality.
• Cyclops's differentiated positioning. The entry point into the sector is extremely focused, serving only payment industry clients (acquirers, PSPs), not engaging in exchange business or developing C-end retail wallet services for ordinary users; all product functions are built around payment acquisition and merchant settlement scenarios while neutrally integrating multiple stablecoin and on-chain service providers. In terms of disadvantages, compared to long-established competitors like ZeroHash, Cyclops's commercial operation time is shorter, and its accumulation of client cases is still in the early stages, with its global licensing landscape still expanding.

Additionally, Ubyx and Fnality focus on interbank large-value clearing, which is distinctly different from Cyclops's retail merchant acquisition scenarios; while Stripe and Visa are exploring stablecoin payments, their core business is on the merchant traffic side, which is a different segment from Cyclops's infrastructure layer positioning. These projects do not have a direct competitive relationship with Cyclops.

In summary, Cyclops targets a niche market: existing B2B stablecoin infrastructure is mostly aimed at comprehensive institutions or end enterprises, lacking a complete solution tailored for the large-scale operations of payment service providers serving numerous small and medium merchants.

Conclusion

Stablecoins are gradually penetrating from crypto-native scenarios to real-world cross-border settlements and daily fund clearing for merchants, with the digital transformation of payment institutions driving a continuous demand for lightweight and compliant on-chain foundational tools. The Cyclops team, emerging from the crypto business segment of traditional payment giants, accurately identifies the market gap where existing infrastructure struggles to adapt to the workflows of payment enterprises, choosing to deeply cultivate the payment sector and avoid direct homogenized competition with comprehensive service providers.

Currently, the project has three advantages: capital support, founding team industry resources, and early benchmark clients, but still faces multiple uncertainties: the ongoing changes in stablecoin regulatory policies across countries will directly affect the pace of license expansion; the customer acquisition cycle for B2B payment infrastructure is long, and it remains to be seen whether it can maintain rapid growth in transaction volume; mature competitors in the sector are also continuously iterating payment scenario solutions, which may intensify market competition in the future. The core focus for medium to long-term development lies in whether it can continue to land more partnerships with leading payment service providers, complete compliance layouts in key regions, and continuously build vertical product barriers in specific scenarios.

References: Fortune: Cyclops raises $8 million... (2026/03/04) Fortune: Exclusive: Cyclops raises $20 million... (2026/07/15)