The advent of stablecoins has made it possible to settle global transactions instantly, but many payment providers have yet to catch up, relying instead on legacy banking infrastructure. The upshot is many merchants and consumers must rely on wire transfers that don’t operate on weekends, or outside banking hours. Miami-based startup Cyclops has plans to change all this and, on Wednesday, announced a $20 million Series A funding round to ensure that more payment providers can start to move money at internet speed.
Cyclops sells an all-in-one infrastructure platform to payments companies, bundling crypto and stablecoin services so they can offer faster settlement and cross‑border transactions without building that tooling themselves.
“There’s tons of businesses and consumers that benefit from that… they want to put that cash to work as quickly as possible,” said Cyclops co-CEO Alex Wilson, who launched the company along with cofounders Pat Duffy and David Johnson.
Nava Ventures led the round, which also included investments from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and GPT Ventures. Cyclops declined to specify at what valuation the startup raised its most recent stash of capital. The new funding follows an $8 million seed round raised in March.
Charity origins
Cyclops’ origin story dates back to 2018, when Wilson and Duffy cofounded their first company called the Giving Block. Like Cyclops, it provided crypto and stablecoin services, but specialized in the charity sector. Since digital assets didn’t have the same popularity they do today, Wilson remembered how challenging it was to convince charities to fundraise with crypto donations. But in time, they persuaded clients like Save the Children and St. Jude to give crypto a try.
Eventually, the cofounders sold the Giving Block to payments company Shift4, where Wilson became the head of crypto and stablecoins. There, he had to figure out how to bring stablecoin settlement to the company’s more than 300,000 merchants. In building out the different solutions needed for each customer, Wilson and his cofounders realized that it was time to build a one-stop-shop focused solely on payments.
In an already cluttered marketplace, Nava Ventures partner Kevin Chenault is convinced that this experience separates Cyclops from its competitors. “They’ve lived and breathed the problem in payments and understand the gaps where stablecoin technology and infrastructure can really… innovate the way in which money is moved,” he said.
Besides Miami, Cyclops also has an office in Vienna, Austria. It has started licensing processes in the United States and Europe and seeks to follow consumer demand globally. Shift4 Payments and Mastercard are among Cyclops’ current clients.
Stablecoins have become one of crypto’s most transcendental inventions. These digital tokens, which are pegged to fiat currencies and emitted by companies rather than a central bank, have proliferated globally, with behemoths like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC dominating the marketplace. Since 2024, their market capitalization has grown 137%, reaching nearly $310 billion, according to data from DefiLlama. Last July, President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, which created a regulatory framework for U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins.
Against this backdrop, GPT Ventures general partner Javier Pérez, who spent nearly 25 years at Mastercard, sees stablecoins as the next natural step in payments. “You can transfer money around quasi-instantly and the more [a] stablecoin becomes popular, the faster it gets, the cheaper it gets, [and] the more ubiquitous it gets,” he said.
