In the past two years, stablecoins have become one of the hottest fields in crypto—so hot that one venture capitalist at a16z crypto decided to leave and launch his own stablecoin startup. The former investor, Sam Broner, announced on Tuesday that he and a college friend have raised $10 million for what they call the Better Money Company, which aims to create a stablecoin clearinghouse, or locale that lets customers cheaply exchange different dollar-backed tokens.
Broner’s former employer, a16z crypto, led the seed round, with participation from BoxGroup and Sunflower Capital, along with notable angel investors like Circle cofounder Sean Neville and Charlie Songhurst, a former Microsoft executive. Broner and his cofounder, Adam Zuckerman, declined to say at what valuation they had raised their capital.
Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm backed the Better Money Company because of Broner, said Ali Yahya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “He very quickly became our stablecoin expert and taught us a lot about stablecoins,” he said in an interview with Fortune. “So primarily, it’s an investment in him, and that tends to be usually the way that we underwrite early-stage investments.”
Token clearinghouse
Even as prices for blue-chip cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum remain far below their 2025 all-time highs, investor fervor for stablecoins hasn’t waned. Proponents of the tokens, which are pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, say they can speed up transactions as well as reduce fees. Financial Goliaths are taking notice. In March, payments titan Mastercard agreed to spend up to $1.8 billion to acquire stablecoin startup BVNK.
“The drumbeat has gotten louder and the urgency has gotten more clear for how they need to integrate stablecoins into their products,” said Broner.
Broner’s new firm is entering an increasingly crowded stablecoin field. There are the mainstays like Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT, but more recently large companies like Klarna, Cloudflare, Sony, and Fiserv have launched their own tokens or signaled they intend to do so. Broner and Zuckerman aim to create a lane for themselves with a clearinghouse to help companies navigate the cluster of new coins.
“If you want to have a growing stablecoin ecosystem, you need to have one place to access the breadth of what’s out there,” said Broner.
Broner, who started his career as a software developer at GE and Microsoft, specialized in investing in stablecoin startups at a16z crypto. During his more-than-two-year tenure at the venture giant, he backed the stablecoin remittance startup Zar as well as a slew of startups from a16z crypto’s accelerator. Meanwhile, Zuckerman worked at law firm Latham & Watkins before leaving to serve as general counsel at crypto startup Eigen Labs. The two originally met while studying for their undergraduate degrees in Massachusetts.
Launching a stablecoin clearinghouse requires developing partnerships with stablecoin issuers. Broner and Zuckerman plan to create accounts with different crypto companies that let them put in orders for new tokens more cheaply than buying or selling stablecoins on the open market. Since they founded their startup in November, they’ve since received commitments from a number of issuers who intend to join the clearinghouse, including Paxos, Stripe’s Bridge, MoonPay, and others.
They intend to support any token compliant with the Genius Act, recently signed-into-law legislation that regulates the burgeoning stablecoin ecosystem. That notably excludes USDT, the largest stablecoin on the market, but not its American version, USAT.
They haven’t launched their product publicly yet, but plan to let customers use their clearinghouse in the coming weeks, said Broner. “The mission is making stablecoins better money,” added Zuckerman.