Modern Treasury, a payments infrastructure company valued at $2.1 billion, has acquired the stablecoin startup Beam, the companies announced Wednesday. The acquisition was an all-stock transaction worth about $40 million, according to a source familiar with the deal, who asked to remain anonymous while discussing private business discussions.
Founded in 2022, Beam provides banks and other corporations with software to send and receive stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. Modern Treasury, first incubated in the summer 2018 cohort of Y Combinator, pitches itself as a one-stop shop for corporations to handle money movement.
“We were coming with the fiat DNA,” said Modern Treasury CEO Matt Marcus, referring to currencies backed by governments. “And they [Beam] had the stablecoin DNA.”
Marcus, Modern Treasury’s cofounder and CEO, and Dan Mottice, cofounder and CEO of Beam, declined to disclose financial details of the acquisition.
Stablecoin fever
Modern Treasury has built its business simplifying payments across traditional financial rails like wires and ACH. Its decision to dive into the stablecoin business is the latest sign that fintech companies are taking the rise of dollar-backed cryptocurrencies seriously.
Proponents say stablecoins, designed to stay stable as opposed to more volatile tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are a quicker and cheaper means to send and receive money than existing options.
While stablecoins have been a facet of crypto trading for more than a decade, mainstream interest in the tokens heated up after the fintech giant Stripe said in October 2024 that it had acquired the stablecoin startup Bridge for $1.1 billion. That deal, as well as recent legislation that creates a regulatory framework for the tokens as well as a blockbuster IPO from the stablecoin giant Circle, have made stablecoins one of the buzziest topics in Silicon Valley outside of AI.
The crypto and stablecoin infrastructure company Zerohash, the stablecoin issuer Agora, and the team behind a Stripe-backed payments blockchain have raised hundreds of millions of dollars since January. And Mastercard and Coinbase have held late-stage talks to acquire another stablecoin startup for around $2 billion.
Beam has raised a more modest $14 million since it first launched almost three years ago. Its last round valued the company at $44 million, according to data from Pitchbook. Mottice, who used to help lead Visa’s crypto team, declined to comment on his company’s prior valuations.
The Beam founder will join Modern Treasury as part of the deal and help lead the company’s expansion into stablecoin payments.
“I wouldn’t say that it’ll be a push for stablecoins to be plugged into every use case ever, but we will definitely include that as a key part of the arsenal,” said Mottice.
