Earlier this summer, FirstMark co-led Velocity’s $38 million Series A alongside Dragonfly.

Today, Velocity announced an additional $10 million in funding from Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures, Ripple, Haun Ventures, Translink Capital, and Mirana Ventures, bringing the company’s total Series A to $48 million.

The Thesis Is Playing Out

When we first announced our investment, we described the problem pretty simply:

CFOs, treasurers, payments companies, and financial institutions understand the benefits of instant, global, 24/7 money movement. What they don’t want is the operational burden that comes with moving their financial stack on-chain.

They don’t want to manage wallets and custody providers across markets. They don’t want to stitch together liquidity, FX, compliance, and on/off ramps themselves. And they certainly don’t want to replace the ERP, treasury, and banking infrastructure they already rely on.

They want the benefits of stablecoins without having to become crypto companies.

That’s what Velocity is building.

Velocity is a stablecoin-native payments and treasury platform purpose-built for the enterprise. It connects the new rails emerging on-chain with the systems global businesses already use, allowing them to move funds in real time, manage liquidity more efficiently, reduce reliance on prefunding, and extend settlement beyond traditional banking hours.

The product thesis hasn’t changed since July, but the people and companies around the table bringing it to life have.

Follow the Ecosystem

Visa sits at the center of global payments. Circle has built one of the foundational assets of the stablecoin economy. Ripple has spent years working on institutional money movement. Haun Ventures has backed multiple generations of stablecoin and financial infrastructure companies.

These investors each approach the market from a different angle. Their convergence around Velocity is meaningful.

The next phase of stablecoin adoption won’t be won by blockchains or issuers alone. It will require infrastructure that connects those assets to the banking, payments, treasury, and settlement systems where trillions of dollars already move.

That was our thesis when we invested.

The participation of companies operating at the center of those systems makes us even more confident in it.

There’s also a strategic dimension here that matters. Velocity is building for issuers, acquirers, payment providers, financial institutions, merchants, CFOs, and treasurers. Those customers sit inside an interconnected ecosystem. The closer Velocity gets to the networks, stablecoin issuers, financial institutions, and infrastructure providers shaping that ecosystem, the stronger the platform can become.

Enterprise financial infrastructure has always been built through product, trust, distribution, and relationships.

Velocity is assembling all four.

Still Spring Training

Stablecoins have already grown into a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars asset class. We continue to believe they can become a foundational rail for a financial system measured in trillions.

But getting there requires making the underlying technology almost invisible.

A treasurer shouldn’t have to think about which blockchain is being used to settle a payment. A payments company shouldn’t need to maintain idle capital around the world because banking rails close at night and on weekends. A global business shouldn’t need a crypto operations team to take advantage of faster settlement.

The infrastructure should simply work.

Eric Queathem and the Velocity team understood that from the beginning. Eric spent nearly a decade at Worldpay and knows how the global payments ecosystem actually operates. He is building Velocity around the needs of the institutions that move money at scale, rather than asking those institutions to adapt themselves to crypto.

That distinction is what drew us to the company in the first place.

In July, we wrote that Velocity could become the on-chain treasury layer for the world’s largest businesses and help take the stablecoin ecosystem from $300 billion to $3 trillion.

It’s still early.

But with Visa, Circle, Haun Ventures, and others joining the partnership, the ecosystem around that vision is getting stronger, and we couldn’t be more excited for the next inning with Eric and team.