Fin emerges from stealth with $17M seed round to build stablecoin infrastructure for enterprise payments

Two former Citadel engineers just stepped out of the shadows with a simple pitch: make sending millions of dollars across borders as easy as sending a text message. Fin, co-founded by Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj, emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $17 million in seed funding to build a stablecoin-powered payments platform aimed squarely at enterprise clients.

The round was led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next also participating.

What Fin actually does

At its core, Fin is a global payments platform that uses stablecoin rails to settle cross-border transactions. The targets are high-value transfers, think hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, for businesses like import-export firms that currently rely on sluggish bank wires.

The app lets users send funds to other Fin users, bank accounts, or crypto wallets. The company is deliberately trying to keep the experience simple, burying the blockchain plumbing beneath a clean interface so that a CFO at a logistics company doesn’t need to understand crypto jargon to move money.

On the revenue side, Fin plans to make money two ways: charging transaction fees and earning interest on its stablecoin reserves.

A pilot program with import-export businesses is slated for January 2026.

The team and the timing

Krotinsky and Dheeraj both come from Citadel, the quantitative trading giant, where they experienced the pain points of cross-border payments firsthand while managing personal projects that necessitated international payouts.

The US GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, created a clearer regulatory framework for stablecoins, giving institutional players more confidence to build on and transact with dollar-denominated digital assets.

Taking on the banks

Fin is positioning itself as a direct competitor to traditional correspondent banking networks, including giants like JPMorgan and Barclays. By going after enterprise transactions in the hundreds-of-thousands-to-millions range, Fin is pursuing a segment where the pain points are acute and the willingness to pay for better infrastructure is high.

What to watch

The January 2026 pilot will be the first meaningful indicator of whether Fin’s technology holds up under real-world conditions. Enterprise cross-border payments involve layers of complexity that don’t show up in demos: sanctions screening, anti-money laundering compliance across jurisdictions, currency conversion at scale, and handling edge cases when transactions fail.

The interest earned on stablecoin reserves also introduces a question that regulators are still working through. If Fin is holding customer funds as stablecoins and earning yield on the reserves backing those stablecoins, the line between payments platform and quasi-bank gets blurry.

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