# HEVN got into Y Combinator at one month old with stablecoin payments for traders

Neo, a Stabledash show. Sep 1, 2026. Peter Volnov.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/neo/episodes/hevn-explained-moving-money-for-the-commodity-traders-banks--Bctg4ooxzw

Peter Volnov says banks put cross-border traders on hold, and HEVN's answer is compliance that is faster and more predictable, not easier.

HEVN, a global business operating system and stablecoin settlement platform for companies that trade across borders, got into Y Combinator at one month old. Co-founder and CEO Peter Volnov says the company serves traders and resellers whom traditional banks routinely put on hold.

## From HOT Labs to HEVN

Peter Volnov and his cofounders exited HOT Labs earlier this year. Their new company, HEVN, offers accounts through sponsor banks in the US, Europe, the UAE, LatAm and Puerto Rico.

## Why banks hold traders

Peter Volnov says a bank's ideal customer has a limited number of counterparties that are verified once and are "very predictable every month." A trader who sends money to 20 different countries through many entities gets the opposite: delays and random holds. Traders cannot tell a supplier that a payment has been sitting in their bank for two weeks, he says.

HEVN targets traders and resellers rather than manufacturers. According to Volnov, it offers local bank accounts with cryptocurrency rails in the UAE, supports Singaporean rails for paying offshore, and gets better forex rates in many currencies by using different liquidity providers. Dakota is one of its providers.

## Where payments get stuck

Peter Volnov says million dollar plus transactions with new counterparties currently do not work. In his view liquidity is not the problem. These payments need more attention from compliance teams, and when crypto sits in the middle, a bank sees a company off-ramping a million dollars without the full trail of the transaction. For now HEVN focuses on small businesses with volume below $500,000.

## Documents and AI agents

HEVN declines transactions above set limits that lack the full story: invoices, contracts and logistics certificates. Looking ahead, Peter Volnov expects systems where compliance teams share information instantly, document requests go out instantly, and AI agents respond on the company's side.

Volnov presents HEVN as a bet that the bottleneck in cross-border trade is the speed of compliance, not access to money. On his account, the fix is complete paperwork collected up front and compliance teams that can share information, so payments arrive on a predictable schedule.

## Key takeaways

1. HEVN, the stablecoin settlement platform co-founded by Peter Volnov, got into Y Combinator when it was one month old.
2. Peter Volnov says banks delay traders who pay into 20 different countries, and that million dollar payments to new counterparties stall on compliance attention, not liquidity.
3. HEVN asks for invoices, contracts and logistics documents above set limits, and Volnov says the goal is to make compliance faster and more predictable.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Hosts open the show and welcome Peter Volnov
- 1:27 Leaving HOT Labs led the founders to start HEVN
- 4:41 Joining YC early helped HEVN find international trade users
- 8:48 Banks put holds on traders who pay many counterparties
- 11:47 Growth comes from specific rails, better forex and repeat trust
- 13:26 Million dollar stablecoin payments get stuck in bank compliance
- 16:23 Required documents and AI can make compliance faster
- 19:04 AI does most of the team's work with humans checking
- 21:28 Relationships and trade data give HEVN its defensibility
- 23:41 Peter recommends Roots Finance and praises Dakota as a provider

## Transcript

**Host** (0:00)

Value transfer is nothing new. Hunt, gather, trade, expand. An exchange that's older than instant. The strongest prevail and the fastest survive. The function remains as its form continues to accelerate forward.

**Host** (0:46)

Alright. We got Peter.

**Peter Volnov** (0:48)

Looks looks to be in a way more beautiful place than me. Looks beautiful. Where are you, Peter? Welcome to the show. Hi. Good morning. Glad to see you. I'm, like, two hours away from San Francisco. We've had a, small recent year, and we're using Starlink. So I hope connection's gonna be bad. And this is Shout out to Starlink. Some place in the area I could found. So

**Host** (1:09)

we had quite the day on this show. People people... We've had we've had... Zach, what do we have? We've had Jakarta

**Host** (1:16)

Jakarta. Colorado. Colorado. Tel Aviv. I think Tel Aviv's in New York. San Francisco. I'm, like, two hours from San Francisco. So, you know, some of backyard in the background. Saint Louis. But, man, hey, neobanking is heavenly. I've... We've been... I'm excited to talk with you, Peter. We've we've kind of been... We've... Like I mentioned on LinkedIn, I've kind of been lurking in your post for the past, you know, four or five months, kinda ever since I think you joined Y Combinator.

But, man, kind of bring us into this moment. You've been working, you know, in fintech, it looks for... Looks like a while now. What's led you to, you know, to founding Heavenly and and building what you're what you're building? Yeah. So we... Before the before the Heavenly, right, we've been for four years building the

**Peter Volnov** (1:59)

wallet for four years, and we touch so many different parts of the cryptocurrency. And when I came there in space, it was to 2021, and everybody was excited about how cryptocurrency gonna change the economy and, like, the way people do transact and interact with each other. I don't think that very much happened. And, like, this interaction of cryptocurrency been, like, very very shifting from this original idea.

And we've been building the crypto wallet in, like, a lot of, like, very very, like, market cycles, and it's all emotions around. So we we exited a a company called Hotlabs in... Earlier this year. And me and my cofounders, we were thinking, okay. What do we do next? And we kind of... Okay. Well, we was not able to fix the the the the economy part with cryptocurrency itself. Maybe we should try to do something in between. And here, a lot of regulations came recently, like the.

Now it's way more clear how you can actually build the fintech product for, like, regular companies to just deliver them better quality product without making them crypto users. And we're like, okay. Well, that's it. We we we do definitely see that there is a lot of companies starting in the space, but, definitely, the market is much, much bigger. And possibility is much, much bigger. So let's go to the space. We'll see what we can do, and and that's how we started having.

**Host** (3:28)

What's your relationship been like with your with your cofounders? You know, I I just find that inspiring. Just like, We were building this one company. Maybe this wasn't the right company, but this doesn't mean I don't wanna work with you guys. What's it been like continuing to build in in kind of this new chapter with them? And what about it has this made you guys wanna even stick together in general?

**Peter Volnov** (3:48)

Oh, well, I think for us, it's been like we're we're... I'm very lucky with my cofounders. Right? Like, with with Andrew, my CTO, we, like, known together for, like, seven years, and we did a few pet projects before Heaven. So before before Hot Labs. So it actually was, like, very obviously, like, high. I don't think we did enough. I don't think we built, like, the billion dollar company. Don't think we... It's kind of, like, okay. We...

It was sort of, like, different direction, but we were just, like, had so much legacy and, like, so much in a in a backpack. So it's been, like, more obvious idea to kind of start a new company. But it was, like, similar vision, similar, like, idea about, like, we together wanna build the cool stuff. It's not something change internally. It's more like, okay.

We probably was not in a very right product, and it's the best way to start again is just to relaunch this everything with a with a new company, with a different direction.

**Host** (4:41)

We... Peter, we've been talking the last hour about the role that really all of... Like, Neo, the the part of the show that we're talking about really is... We've met with now over a dozen different companies building neo bank like products, building for either retail or institutional use cases, and just, like, a massive opportunity that exists there. How do you really anchor the the market in understanding what what you're building and and who it really is for?

It seems like there's a really specific focus on, like, the international use case outside of The US. And maybe speak a little bit about the experience with Y Combinator, and and we also noticed that you went through that, which is awesome.

**Peter Volnov** (5:30)

Yeah. Absolutely. So the... Actually, when we just started, we was trying to off. Right? Like, we're running a startup. And we obviously... Our startup was very international. We have branches in, like, in Dubai, in Hong Kong, and we was, like, trying to to... Okay. Let's make sure that we can use banking very convenient. And there's nothing like Brex exist in Dubai, right, if you... In terms of banking... Cooperative banking. So that was original idea. And going forward, we we just see, okay, who is our users?

We see who is... We got into YC very early. We was, like, one month old company. It was very... We just was, like, trying to test different stuff. We we got into YC. We... The first three months, we try every different direction with people, to look to use cases. And around demo day, we start to see, like, quite significant growth and evolving from, like, specific direction. Right? It's mainly APAC or MENA countries transact to Europe. And we started to learn who stays be... Behind these transactions.

And we saw this very, very cool use case, I think, which is related in international trade. And there's a lot of companies who's particularly responsible to move goods and move money across border, especially, like, the physical goods and say, it pays a lot. And part of these problems is payments delay, which cause them a lot of extra expenses. Because if you if your payment didn't go in time, your stuff might not be delivered or you you know, can pay late late payment fees or, like, so many bad things can happen.

And we figured out that this company, like, in specific, has, like, very big problem with them trying to use Swift. And we we did have solution. So we specifically focus on them, and and it's... We're going pretty pretty well right now. How did you convince Y Combinator

**Host** (7:18)

to accept you in the very, very beginning of the business even being a thing? What was what was like... What were some of these things that you think made it attractive for for that team to welcome you into that cohort? I know it's not easy to to get accepted.

**Peter Volnov** (7:34)

It's hard for me to say. Right? Like, it's... My team tried to keep their application process, like, extremely, extremely protective. So I don't know what was the exact reason, but I think they did have a call for startup who building on Stablecoin in the p twenty six batch. So it's definitely been some sort of the interest in the space in general. And, also, we can't...

Been in this position where we we just building, like, a company in a in a cryptocurrency for, like, years, and we're starting some new journey with the exact same team. And, also, like, we we did, like, okay, well, pretty last time, like, in terms of, like, the the revenue and, like, the users. So I think it was just... And the space definitely kind of has very good potential. Right? Like, the... Right now is a lot of a lot of small players going to the space and especially on the distribution part.

So it's definitely gonna be very, very big winners. So I think this combined... I I honestly believe me, my cofounders have, like, pretty pretty good fit to do the the new bank on top of this table called coin technology on top. And it's just very good timing for us and for them, very very aligned in direction. Maybe maybe that's

**Host** (8:48)

Yeah. It also seems like you guys are really focused on the go to market, like, who you really wanna serve. It looks like the industries here that you're specifically targeting, you have manufacturing, importers, exporters, commodity traders. Like, we were just on the last segment speaking on the massive opportunity for platforms, business focused platforms like this that can really be opinionated on defining the industries they wanna go after.

What is so unique about manufacturers, for example, that make this type of solution that attractive? And why why manufacturing and some of these larger, like, import export use cases? What's so specifically

**Peter Volnov** (9:28)

valuable about having to them? Yeah. I think to be more specific, we currently mainly target non manufacturer itself. We target the the traders, right, or, like, the resellers. So there's a... The way a lot... Big part of the international trade work right now, there's a manufacturer or producer in one country, and there's a lot of distributors local in different countries. And between them, there's, like, logistic payments, all those job, which is often made by the traders.

And the job of the traders, it's company who has a big volume. They don't produce anything. They just buy one place, transport it, and sell in another place. Usually, these traders work in a b to b space, so the job basically is to deliver stuff and money between two entities and, of course, throw, like, connect connect dots. And this company, specifically, they have a... They have no real production. Right? They have a lot of volume. They work with a lot of different countries.

Every transaction for them is like, okay. Now we buy... We we we have supplier in this country. We have the buyer in this country. So they're consistently solving challenges with moving country... Money between different counterparties. And it's not very, very attractive behavior for the banks. Right? If you if you have a bank, your perfect customer is the one who only serves his own account and use it for investment.

Or number two is about the one with the limited amount of counterparties who you have to verify one time, and it's very predictable every month. Payment go from this channel, to these counterparties. It's... That's what banks want to see. And when you work with somebody who transact to, like, 20 different countries, like, so many different entities, they... The bank start put a lot of, like, delays on the payments and, like, start to put them on a random holes holes.

And that's what's gonna create a lot of a lot of damage for the business. Right? Because if you have to buy somebody, it would not explain to the manufacturer or supplier that, okay. Like, the payments is on every file for two weeks in my bank. So I I I need... Who never knows how many times to process it. Yeah. And, basically, for them, this this actual very critical part of the business. And if they can make transaction predictable, they're ready to pay extra. They're ready to pay for the speed.

They're ready to pay for the predictable payments, and that's why they go to Heaven.

**Host** (11:47)

Peter, the the last month, it sounds like, has been especially crazy, you know, growing... You see growing 520 in transaction volume. Did you see... You know, did you kinda see this, call it, good storm coming, or was this, like, a week into the month, something... It just started blowing up? What what what led up to these... The prior months that, you know, that led to this? And also, what's it been like going through this? Does it still validating? Was it surprising?

**Peter Volnov** (12:16)

Yeah. So the part of this number is, of course, we're quite fresh company. Right? If you're revel in size, 500% is much.

**Host** (12:25)

Still true, though.

**Peter Volnov** (12:27)

So part is... Of course, it's a part of this. Well, I think that we we... Commodity traders and stuff, they growing quite slowly. Right? They start using us for some specific countries, like, very specific rails where they have issues. For example, we we can provide local bank accounts with cryptocurrency rails in UAE. Right? Or, like, we support Singaporean rails to pay to offshore. Right?

It's it's something quite unique for, like, majority of, like, startups who use, like, bridge and try to sell remittance to, like, Latin America. Like... So we also support, like, bigger volume transactions. And that's... Basically, we have a room to scale. And once the company tries for one payment, they start trust us more, try again, try again. And and they just start growing volume and then move more and more of their payments to heaven because they feel it's it's faster. It's more predictable. We...

And in many currency, we have better forex rates because we use different liquidity providers. So it's kind of makes sense for them go to this direction. Obviously, we already see a lot of limitation infrastructure. I think that's my biggest job right now is to figure out, okay, some... Because we use stablecoins. Right? It's... On some scale, it's faster. After some scale, it's harder because every stablecoin transaction is much harder to track... Trail. Right?

And even if we trail, we need to communicate it properly with the banks. We need to communicate it properly with with providers where this payment's coming from. Because every time they have Erify, it's create a lot of friction for the customers, for them, and it's damaged the experience. So Can you can you just like expand on that a little bit? Like what... At what point does this become

**Host** (14:03)

like, say more on what you mean. Like, it reaches a certain point where it becomes difficult. Like, what point is that, and what's happening at that Million

**Peter Volnov** (14:11)

dollar plus transactions currently for the new counterparties doesn't work Due to, like, slippage and liquidity and issues like this or I think the biggest... The liquidity is not a problem. The biggest problem is the... This transaction usually require more attention from compliance team to verify and, like, to understand the nature of the business payments. And usually, if that's...

If your your payments went through fiat, right, you have swift, you have the sender, you have receiver, you have kind of default infrastructure how you can understand the nature of transaction. If if there was cryptocurrency involved, they're different. Because what banks see is some company just started to off ramp for a million dollar company in cryptocurrency. And they don't see the trail... The whole trail of the transaction. Right?

Like, they don't understand that they just received this payment in different country. And not every not every compliance team, like, very familiar with this pattern. So it's... They start to ask more questions, and then they do say very slow to reply. And the customers come to us and, like, you did promise to deliver this speed. Right? And, like, oh, like, we we're losing money right now because payment is unverified. And we just... Okay. Like, well, we we don't...

We cannot do that much because that's that's a bank compliance team, not ours. So a situation like this, when different banks, different providers the communication between user and these providers does not exist right now. So we we... Here, we know some context about the the transaction, but we cannot properly deliver to provider. Provider cannot properly deliver it to the bank. It all happened with emails. And there's a lot of human in the loop.

I think this is part of the problem, of course, with, like, many others to... And, of course, every situation like this damages our experience for users. Right? We try to put ourselves in position where we can comfortably manage your your big... For the international traders, small small businesses is everything below 500,000,000 monthly... Or yearly volume. Right? So and for these companies, we need to have a proper infrastructure to serve them, and and that's a challenge.

**Host** (16:23)

What what sort of solutions around compliance, certain infrastructure companies, partners, things you're building internally. Like, how do you actually go about solving that? And, I mean, it makes sense. Right? Like, that's a lot of money being transferred. And and to be able to do it in a frictionless programmatic way, like, it is a very sensitive... Especially industries like this. Right?

Like, you're you're serving a very high risk industry that that is known for a lot of, like, global, you know, things things around the world that, you know, can go wrong if if if left unchecked. Right? So how do you... How are you practically dealing with this?

**Peter Volnov** (17:00)

Yeah. So the compliance is, like, of course, depends on the two parts. Right? Like, it's how much information you have about the transaction and how fast you can process this information. So currently, we we try to be... To to avoid the companies where we don't have enough information. Right? If we don't have a full story, like invoices, contracts, like certificates of, like, the... Like, logistic contracts, we we try not to attach these transactions, or we just say, hi. Sorry.

For a transaction bill above this limit, you just need to have these documents on hands because we're gonna be asked. And if you don't have these documents, your transaction is gonna be reverted. We're gonna pay pay fees. So we try to be more careful with this part, of course, and this part is actually quite easy. Usually, in, like, logistic companies, there is a... Of course, there's, like, company related to, like, which unintentionally try not to provide these documents. This part of the market exist.

But there's a lot of companies who have everything, who are happy to provide. And they usually have a, like, a a girl in the team who just... Who job is to reply to these emails to make sure everything works. So we try to focus on payments where the the amount of information is not actually the problem. There is the speed of the processing is the problem, and that's what's fixable. Right? It's not very, very easy to fix because, of course, we we we go to the banks or providers.

We're not responsible for majority of the volume, and we require a lot of attention to our customers. And we rely a lot of, like, require a lot of, like, build stuff specifically for us. So... But on scale, it it can be solved. I'm pretty sure we can have the system where we have instant sharing information between, like, all compliance teams that have similar assets. We have instant request for the documents. And, of course, we have, like, AI agents on the side of the company who has, like, all the documents stack.

And we have, like, requests from the compliance team who can be immediately responded. So the goal is here is not to make compliance easier. I think the goal here is to make it faster and more predictable. And that's doable with with a YAIN, like, with just investing more in, like, this specific problem.

**Host** (19:04)

I'm going to war with a fly right now. That's why I'm laughing while you're speaking about compliance. Like, why is this guy find compliance so funny?

**Host** (19:14)

That has been a common theme. Compliance and AI. And it's like, we so quickly wanna go down the rabbit hole. Like, agents are best for payments. We gotta move money. We gotta do payments. Ryan from Dakota was talking about that, and I think there's a place for that in the business stack. But it seems like to even just scale your core business, that this seems like the the lowest hanging fruit that says, we spend so much time sifting through paperwork that we just need agents that can handle this compliance.

I think Millie from Breeze in our upcoming episode, they also talk about that in the payments world when it comes to, like, managing chargeback. She's like, agents should be doing all this work. Compliance teams don't need to be doing this. What's it been like from your perspective building heaven? Like, outside of just compliance, where does AI fit into this stack? Where are the right places to use AI? Where are the maybe some of the wrong places?

I mean, especially when you see some of this growth in the past six months, I I have to believe that this probably wouldn't have been possible without AI to some degree, but it feels like it's such a fine line. Yeah. Well, for us, it's... We are... We're we're a super native team, so we we try to do everything with AI. Every time I plan my day, I go to, like, the the cloud and ask, okay. What's Notion task I have? What's the schedule? Is it context about all my calls? I'm gonna have everything.

**Peter Volnov** (20:26)

AI is, like, kind of super powerful assistant in helping to assess all information. Of course, it makes, like, their... The sales task, their communications, their their documents validation. Everything's more, like, faster and much higher quality. Like, of course, they're they're making code itself with this and, like, security. I don't think there's any specific specific problem with, like, a fully trust UI. I think it's mainly they do 90% of job, and we have 10% of human in the loop.

So we work 10 times more productively because we delegate so many task for... To UI, Especially in, like, fintech. There's a lot of, like, forms policies. A lot of a lot of you have to read and you have to write. Every every every compliance case, there's a lot of paperwork around, which is, like, 95% done by the AI. So I think that's, obviously the team who use it can grant much better experience and may... In way smaller cost than the team who try to do everything on paper.

We are trying to be team like this from, like, day one.

**Host** (21:28)

Yeah. Last question, Peter, from my end as we think about what is getting built with AI, where are humans in the loop, where does defensibility exist for a company like this? Like, what... What's been the hardest piece of this business for you to build?

Where have you found, like, when you think about defensibility, raising capital, like, the the kind of positioning here, what is the hardest part about making Heaven successful, and what part of the stack here are you focused mostly on to really win and, like, stay differentiated?

**Peter Volnov** (22:02)

I think they are, like... In Affinity itself, it's like your relationship and infrastructure is number one. With the community, the with the industry, with the traders, with the providers, with banks, That's, like, something where people are always in the loop to make sure, like, yeah, I would not damage, like, someone correct communication, trust, and, like, their... As a good good willing to work together. I think in general, your your job here is you need to introduce technology of stablecoins.

You have to be on frontier. Right? So you have to spend more resources to go to the road, which is gonna be easier for every company. Same. Let's do the Every company after you. And the same time, it's it's all... It's something what can give you some more. Right? Like, if you're the first to go to specific customers, industry, like, specific compliance problem you try to solve, like, okay. There... Actually, there are, like, commerce is... Yes.

It has a lot of, like, international by default risks, but also it's an industry with a lot of data. If it's, like, e commerce or, like, a lot of a lot of our industry has wireless data because commerce involves dozens of different counter spotters on the ray, which can be, like, counter verify the... What's actually happening. And now with AI, this process can actually be super, super escalated.

So I believe that specifically for that transaction where they currently have a lot of friction, where they have data to make a good decision, and we have, like, right now the proper technology to do it. That's where we have, like, a big gap to, like, kind of replace a lot of existing players.

**Host** (23:37)

That's awesome. Zach, you wanna you wanna take us home?

**Host** (23:41)

Yeah. You know, last question here. Peter, who should we interview? Maybe somebody that was in your Y Combinator group, a partner that you've been working with building. If we've already interviewed them, then great. We're doing the right thing. But I wanna interview the person who made this video. This video is just so beautiful. That's who I wanna interview. So

**Host** (24:00)

good.

**Peter Volnov** (24:01)

You should definitely talk to Roots team. Do you know Roots?

**Host** (24:05)

Is a new one.

**Peter Volnov** (24:06)

They're they're really, really sharp team. They're actually the bank, the sponsor bank for the fintech from APAC region and specifically. And it's gonna be one of the first banks who will work with APAC time zone. It's gonna be US bank. They have a lot of insight about the the the specific part of the Roots? I

**Host** (24:33)

can't find it. How do you spell it? Roots? Like like, the tree roots? But

**Peter Volnov** (24:37)

they just recently fundraised the seed. It's roots dot finance, I believe. Roots dot finance.

**Host** (24:44)

Let's see. This is the best way to find out about new companies. Got them. You're asking for

**Peter Volnov** (24:51)

I don't think they're super public. They're, like, currently making their... A lot of their regulatory work under the hood, but they're, like, super sharp too.

**Host** (25:01)

Super sharp. We love it. We love the It's coming on. Let's do it. Peter, how long are you in San Francisco for?

**Peter Volnov** (25:08)

Point and a half years.

**Host** (25:11)

Oh, so you... This... You... That's that's base? That's where you're building out of? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No no plans on leaving. So

**Peter Volnov** (25:20)

it's Okay. This this everything is just for, like, ten days outside of the city. Yeah.

**Host** (25:26)

Awesome, sir. Well, I'll be sure to hit you up.

**Peter Volnov** (25:29)

Well, the the Starlink worked pretty well. I think we should we should Yes. Pretty good. Pretty good. Need to tell our guests. Star... Starlink is approved.

**Host** (25:38)

Maybe, Drew, I've been telling them. We need to go out, go on the top of a mountain somewhere, and do the stream, like, live out in nature. So this is making me more and more confident that my dream can come to life. So, Peter, thanks for thanks for stopping you, Zach. Just just just pick up and get us started. And no one's... Nothing's stopping you.

**Host** (25:57)

Yeah. Peter, thanks, man. This is fun. Keep building. Keep us in touch. By the way, we also use Dakota

**Peter Volnov** (26:03)

under... It's one of our providers. Looking forward to Caesar's feet. And Awesome. They're pretty good in serving the... Especially, they they have a few B2C customers, I think, with a high volume, not the primary target, but Yep. Great experience with the project. So

**Host** (26:19)

shout out to Dakota. We'd love that. Shout out to Dakota. To to what you're building, man. Alright. Have a good one.

**Host** (26:25)

Bye. Thanks, Peter. See you.

**Host** (26:28)

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