# Latitude raises $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing total funding to $43M

Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Sep 10, 2026. Cyril Mathew.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/43m-raised-to-settle-stablecoins-into-local-currencies-7Ytfrf8Ogqc

Cyril Mathew says a failed USDC payout pilot at Stripe showed him that stablecoins only work if recipients can get local currency, and Latitude is built to fix that.

Latitude, a stablecoin settlement network, closed a $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total raised to $43M, co-founder and CEO Cyril Mathew says. The company says it converts stablecoin payments into local currency across 50 countries in under two minutes.

## The pilot that failed

At Stripe, Cyril Mathew ran a pilot to send USDC payouts to 100-plus countries. "When we launched the product, it hardly was used," he says, because recipients in places like Vietnam, Ghana and Colombia needed local money for groceries. He says he does not have the thesis that a US dollar stablecoin will be used by everyone, so stablecoins must move in and out of local currencies.

The idea draws on his earlier work. At Uber he paid drivers across 40 countries from a Dutch entity. At Coinbase he says he felt USDC had not taken off when he left, with a market cap of a few million against Tether in the hundreds of millions.

## Funding and licenses

Latitude launched in January 2025 with an $8M round led by NEA, with Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos and Solana also backing it. Mathew says the Series A took about three to four weeks end to end and was not a revenue story yet. He says the company holds about 45 state approvals, which he calls pretty record time in a year and a half.

## A network of networks

Latitude works with banks, exchanges and payment aggregators, with partners including OpenFX and DLocal, and routes each payment to whoever has the best liquidity. Customers onboard through a single API. Mathew says the fiat payouts product covers almost 20 currencies, with on and off ramps building up to 10, while traditional rates in emerging markets can reach 3% or 4%.

He says large markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan and Bangladesh still lack that infrastructure, and plans to use an Uber launcher mentality to find forward-thinking bank partners there.

By mid-2027 Cyril Mathew wants to be live in 30-plus currencies, maybe up to 50 for off-ramps, and to move enterprises past stablecoin pilots that he says stay under half a percent of their flows. In his words, the only thing stopping the company is its execution ability.

## Key takeaways

1. Latitude closed a $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, following an $8M seed led by NEA, for $43M raised in total.
2. Cyril Mathew says a Stripe pilot of USDC payouts to 100-plus countries was hardly used because recipients had no way to spend USDC locally.
3. Latitude targets 30-plus currencies by mid-2027, maybe up to 50 for off-ramps, and wants to sit in enterprises' core payment flows.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Latitude closes $35M Series A, bringing total raised to $43M
- 3:46 At Uber, cross-border driver payouts were slow and expensive
- 8:49 Bitcoin mining at Uber led Mathew to crypto and Coinbase
- 13:41 USDC started slowly but liquidity and listings drove later growth
- 22:19 A 20-page memo pushed Stripe to explore crypto again
- 28:18 Stripe's USDC payout pilot failed without local off-ramps
- 30:51 Latitude owns its licenses and routes across a network of networks
- 37:29 Coverage is growing while big emerging markets still lack infrastructure
- 41:38 Raising $35M before revenue meant betting on licensing and team
- 46:38 Job's not finished: execution market by market is the challenge
- 50:35 Success means 30+ currencies and being in enterprises' core flows

## Transcript

**Cyril Mathew** (0:01)

We're really excited to announce that we closed, a few months ago, a $35M Series A. That brings us total amount raised for Latitude to $43M. When I left Coinbase a year later, I actually felt we didn't succeed in getting USDC off the ground. Fright was limited in its Connect platform, where we could only pay out in about 50-ish countries where we had banking rails. But there's 200 countries in the world. Let's do a pilot where we can do USDC payouts to 100-plus countries.

When we launched the product, it hardly was used. No one was using it. What do I do with USDC in Vietnam? What do I do with it in Ghana? What do I do with it in Colombia? I need to buy groceries, coffee, and local things for my family. This was the spark for me launching Latitude. I do not have the thesis that a US dollar stablecoin will be used by everyone in the world. So you've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies with stablecoins, and that was the light bulb for me.

So we can pay out to the Philippines, to Mexico, to India, all in under two minutes, all in real time. We use a stablecoin to move the money, put a local partner to off-ramp it, but you just onboard at latitude, and it works seamlessly. In mid-2027, I would say we want to be live in 30-plus currencies around the world, maybe up to 50 for the off-ramps. The only thing stopping us from succeeding is our execution ability. Stablecoins

**Host** (1:04)

are the only way to move money. Stableminded is proudly presented by Latitude, your go-to partner for simplifying global payments. I've interviewed hundreds of teams building in modern money. No one has the enterprise track record of the Latitude team. With Latitude, you can move money to any continent in the world in a regulated, compliant, and secure way. Build with global ramp and payout infrastructure now available in over 40 countries. Single API to build any funds flow you can imagine.

If you want an intro, you can pay me on X or go to latitude.xyz to learn more. Cyril, thanks for joining. This is a really big day for you and interesting new start of Stableminded with you all as the elite sponsors. So it's a fun one.

**Cyril Mathew** (1:48)

Appreciate you having us. As I've mentioned, which is sincere, I've been a big fan of your guys' production, how you foster organic convos. A lot of people that I've known personally have been on Lewis, Melly, Vishal. So I'm just really excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity.

**Host** (2:02)

Yeah, man. Bring us into what are you announcing right now? What's the news?

**Cyril Mathew** (2:05)

We're really excited to announce that we closed a few months ago at $35M Series A. That brings us total amount raised for Latitude to $43M. Quick refresher, we, in Jan of 25, launched as a company and raised an $8M round led by NEA, which has been an awesome investor. Rick Yang, who's our partner there, is on the board of Plaid, did early Braintree, he's in Slash.

Just a renowned investor who's been supportive and we're I'm fortunate to have many other good strategics like Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Solana, Bitso, Bits of Gold, I'm trying not to forget anyone, Alchemy. And so there's lots of folks in the industry that took over.

**Host** (2:39)

It's the danger of going down the low list of how you ultimately will frustrate someone.

**Cyril Mathew** (2:43)

Oh, True Markets, Vishal, of course. I can't forget. There we go. That's how we met. Yeah, how we met. Exactly. Big shout out. Good friend and operator to space. And tons of angels that I won't list

**Host** (2:52)

because I don't want to name names.

**Cyril Mathew** (2:53)

But yeah, we've been building for a year and a half and we'll go into Latitude, I'm sure, a little bit more later. But we took the approach of, you know, we're a stablecoin settlement and payouts network that has been busy building licensing in our network, which we'll go into more later. But a year and a half in, we felt it was the right time to really say, hey, we've got early traction. We've got design users. We really need to put gas on the fire, if you will. And so we were fortunate.

We can go more into the process, but to close the $35 million round led by Oak. Oak is renowned both in healthcare, but also fintech. They were investors early in Circle, in Paxos, they were in Bridge, and they've just been really great partners. And they understand the thesis. They understood that an experienced team building the right way in a regulated way was something they wanted to underwrite. We're excited to announce that round today. I'd be remiss.

There's less logos in the Series A, but NEA also took part, Lightspeed Faction, OpenFX, which is a liquidity provider, took part. So we're excited that we have these kind of new investors as well.

**Host** (3:46)

It's awesome. You came out with this blog, I believe, after the initial seed. And I just wanted to use it to frame the conversation up a little bit. We don't do this, but I think just given so much that there is to cover, four key parts here. And this is how you outline this blog, which I really appreciated. The first section goes into your time at Uber and this idea of instant and affordable. The second goes into from Uber going to Coinbase, really taught in circle, talking about simplicity and trust.

And then the third area is really utility, where you're focusing really on where stablecoins as a core primitive come to life and why they're needed and maybe where they're not needed. And then we can, toward the end of the chat, go really into Latitude and what you're building about it. But bring us back to just that initial kind of like aha moment when you were at Uber and thinking about payments and the core mentality that you think about them, which is a global transfer system. Bring us into that.

**Cyril Mathew** (4:39)

Yeah, the high level I would mention is these experiences are really personal to me. That's what I've lived, and it's what really drove us to start Latitude. And so the first section that you mentioned, when I was at Uber, let's take a quick snapshot. I was based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which was Uber's international headquarters for tax reasons. Any driver outside of the US, which at the time were already up to 40 countries, was paid out through that Dutch entity.

**Host** (5:01)

Why is that generally for people who don't know? What are the advantages of that?

**Cyril Mathew** (5:04)

Main one is you pick international geos. A lot of the tech companies had picked Ireland, but the Dutch was a friendly regulator for what Uber wanted to do and friendly corporate tax environment. And so for tax reasons, Uber had set up internationally and again, US paid out US drivers, but internationally that included Latin America, Africa, Asia, most of the drivers there, notwithstanding if Uber had a local entity in the market or two was paid out through that entity.

**Host** (5:26)

And so it was my first

**Cyril Mathew** (5:28)

time, I had come from Facebook before I was in tech, but my first time I really started to understand payments, because I didn't realize that when you had to pay a driver and it went from country A to country B, all of a sudden the card interchange rates skyrocketed, right? And so the fees were expensive because it was cross border. And then the settlement times, how long it took to get to the drivers was really long.

And so the number one requested feature from Uber partner drivers, and I believe that's still the case even today, even with all this innovation, is how do I get my money faster? How could I get paid even more frequently? And just anything about getting those wages and why. And like, as a Western person, Still in the Western US to Amsterdam, I still didn't fully understand that this driver in Ghana or this driver in Argentina, 40% of those wages were put to petrol for your car. So they needed it for working capital.

And then amongst that, you needed groceries and all these things. So they're relying on that weekly or biweekly wage. And so at the time we just did these like what I would call lipstick on a pig solutions is, okay, let's front them money with a driver debit card. We did some partnerships in Canada and other places for that. Maybe let's use innovative ways of looking at their reliable driver and fronting them money.

**Host** (6:32)

If we could dive into maybe some of that, like pick apart these early implementations of getting around that in a creative way.

**Cyril Mathew** (6:38)

Good question. I just glossed over that too quickly. So there's a few solutions, Dan, that actually I would argue still is primarily used now for your everyday company. Uber is a very sophisticated payments company because they've felt this problem for a long time now. But the first way, if you want to pay internationally is SWIFT. You send wire equivalent through SWIFT and it gets to the destination market several days later and for a lot of fees.

And so you've got to plan that payment in advance because it's expensive. Uber is not trying to do that every day, right? There are the networks have innovated in some solutions like Visa Direct and MasterCard Send. That's ways that if they have a card, you can push a payment to that card. But again, while it's instant in some markets, the adoption in emerging markets is scarce and it's expensive. You can be paying two or 3% on that way. That's meaningful to an Uber driver that needs that perpetual.

**Host** (7:18)

Is it scarce because it's expensive or maybe in a

**Cyril Mathew** (7:21)

No, just the other thing we take for granted in the West, you know, while cards are a great solution. I'm a big fan of the card networks. I've worked with them in all my stops. A lot of people just don't use cards in a lot of these markets. Africa's a major cash-driven market. In Kenya, you know, I shouldn't call Africa one market, country by country. In Kenya, they use mobile money.

**Host** (7:36)

They're really fascinated by the QR code usage. Like, no one really does that in the US, but apparently that's, like, Especially in Latin America. And

**Cyril Mathew** (7:44)

Southeast Asia, like the advent of Alipay, WeChat. We have an on and off ramp in Philippines, which we can talk more about, but the way they deposit is through a QR code system for you to deposit

**Host** (7:53)

in. Does that change, high level, that kind of changes the economics or the incentive systems for these big card networks if the card actually isn't being used?

**Cyril Mathew** (8:02)

For sure. I mean, one of the big incentives that the card networks wanted to push, and they would pay tons of incentive money for it, is cash-to-card. How do we get card adoption in these markets? And, you know, we would incentivize users... Sort of

**Host** (8:13)

like an on-ramp.

**Cyril Mathew** (8:14)

On-ramp. An on-ramp into a debit card. Interesting. In this case, right? How do we get more cards in the hands of people? Because then we could add all these innovative products on top. But what happened is a lot of these markets skipped the cards and went straight to, like, the mobile solutions of QR codes and Kenyan mobile money. But again, we take for granted that cards aren't used in a lot of these markets. Or where cards are used, they're expensive if you go cross-border, right?

So those are two big problem sets, right?

**Host** (8:38)

Okay. That was at least the V1 way that you would do this. Right. For those who did participate, affordability near instant payments with some of these solutions, you were able to kind of see that. What was the key pain that still existed that kind of kept you exploring Bitcoin, Stablecoin?

**Cyril Mathew** (8:54)

Yeah, so we were using solutions. We had Audion as a card process at the time. They were doing good deals for us. You know, new solutions like Wise and all these things came out. But again, when you're sending to emerging markets, these solutions didn't work well. Everyone was playing complex treasury or float games. Like, oh, look, I keep money in the market, so I make it seem like it's settling instantly, but it didn't work. And so there's a guy on my team, I have to give him a shout out, Anurag Ladi.

He's on our cap table. His deal with me is if he started an Uber, he's got to let me do Bitcoin mining on the side, Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, all this stuff. So he started doing all this mining. That

**Host** (9:21)

was his deal with you when he came in? Yeah. Like, hey, I'll work here, but like...

**Cyril Mathew** (9:24)

I'm going to have this side hustle. I'm going to have this side

**Host** (9:26)

hustle. Is that how you first heard about Bitcoin?

**Cyril Mathew** (9:28)

It's how I first heard about Bitcoin. Maybe I didn't give him a shout on this blog. I know I did before. And I particularly, it's a really, you know, I gloss over this fact. I saw at the time that Bitcoin miners were getting all this Bitcoin. How did they actually get that for money? And at the time, this very early product called USDT had launched. And I was like going, it's kind of like a dollar. And you like get in and out of Bitcoin trades with this dollar. I'm like,

**Host** (9:49)

interesting,

**Cyril Mathew** (9:50)

right? And so I thought, okay, started reading the Bitcoin white paper, went down that rabbit hole. Stablecoins really weren't a thing, but we'd heard of this USDT thing. I thought, man, blockchains

**Host** (9:59)

could be an interesting way to solve these problems. What year roughly are we still right now?

**Cyril Mathew** (10:02)

This is 2017 and 18. Under Rock was doing this on the side. And then I eventually, in 2018, made the jump to join Coinbase. At the end of that year, I was in Europe. They were looking to launch internationally. And I thought, man, blockchains could be an interesting way. This is the leading brand right now, blockchains. And I'd been at Facebook and Uber. I said, I want to go try that. A lot of my Uber colleagues were like, you're going to go to this crypto company, leaving this Uber high growth company.

They were trying to talk me out of it, but I thought I see the trend here and I want to make the jump.

**Host** (10:27)

Yeah. I think a lot of people who, myself included, I would definitely say this was the reason why Coinbase was like first stop on the journey was like this company has five to 10 years ahead already of what the financial industry is going to have to go through. And their brand, to your point, is arguably still the strongest, most trusted Yeah, crypto brand in the space. I'm like, 100%. So bring us from the like, okay, you're at Uber, you're seeing these things. What was it outside of brand?

Like what was specifically the opportunity and maybe the early role at Coinbase and really your understanding of where blockchains and things like stablecoins start to fit in to real payments use cases and like actually why that is superior

**Cyril Mathew** (11:09)

in your view? Yeah, I mean, the first to jump to Coinbase, I had that hypothesis blockchains could be interesting way to solve some of these problems. It's hard to say at that time, the super crypto enthusiasts, but they were, you know, even at that and we're kind of like, oh, Coinbase is already kind of a major brand. They want to go into DeFi, Binance, all these things. What stood out to me was like, if I wanted to buy a little bit of Bitcoin, it was the easiest to do on Coinbase. No doubt.

It was just like, I can load dollars from my bank account. It was simple. So that resonated with me because I knew simplicity had to be a thing, as I learned from my previous tech stops. And then it seemed to be trusted. Now, I started learning my payments in Uber. I started writing about regulations and bank relationships at Coinbase, and I'll go into that. What I was hired to do is really lead the kind of the business efforts anywhere outside the US. How do we get launched in UK and Europe?

Getting our licensing there. You know, now Rain and all these card issuers are very famous. I actually did the first CryptoLink Visa card with Coinbase from a major exchange. I launched out of Coinbase internationally. I joke, I'll do a quick anecdote. I work with Visa at every one of these stops and I love them. I'm going to give them a little bit of a hard time here. When I was at Uber, I used to go into London visa offices in Paddington, for anyone knows it.

And because we were one of their biggest merchants in the world, the red carpet was rolled out. It said, welcome Cyril and team on the top of it. It was like, what can we do for you? And then fast forward, I'm at Coinbase, I'm launching this first debit card. I was snuck in the side door.

They weren't really like announcing there and again Visa deserves credit because they still did it but it wasn't as welcoming then i was like a lot of the relationships were uh kai sheffield shout out to him was still a big advocate and so that was you know one of the first things i did was launch a debit card for coinbase again this was a very small pilot europe

**Host** (12:45)

etc so you really needed to piece this together and push like this wasn't like a turnkey like a lot of this feels really turnkey right now at this time you were really putting these pieces together

**Cyril Mathew** (12:54)

Absolutely. I was doing in Europe what I learned the U.S. team had done, which is underappreciated. Like, when I was at another role, the future enamored with how fast FTX was going and all that, and sometimes I felt, oh, why are they going so fast? And I now realize, even though I'm throwing myself a little shade, like, what Coinmoose is doing, especially in 2014 and 2015 before I joined, is to get a bank relationship so you can accept the fiat from people in a trusted way.

It was so hard for Brian Armstrong and team. And so we were in the Europe team trying to do the same thing. We started with ClearBank and Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live. Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live.

**Cyril Mathew** (13:41)

I give the Coinbase early team credit for doing all in the US. We were trying to mimic that in Europe to get Coinbase kind of everywhere. That was a big undertaking early on. I would say phase two of my Coinbase journey, we already gave a shout out to Vishal, who introduced us. Coinbase and Circle together decided to launch USDC Stablecoin. Wow, so

**Host** (13:58)

that launched while you were there. Correct. That kind of came to life.

**Cyril Mathew** (14:01)

Yeah, I mentioned learning about USDT. Actually, my exercise to join Coinbase is everyone like a working trial. Give us an exercise. How would you plan this project? All these things we interview. And it was about how should we think about stablecoins? Should we do a consortium? Should we launch our own? And all these things under this paper. It would be interesting to go back and look at that.

**Host** (14:16)

Yeah, wherever that PDF is, that would be like, go put that on chain somewhere.

**Cyril Mathew** (14:20)

Yeah, most of it was wrong. So fast forward, Coinbase and Circle do this USDC launch. You know, Vishal, who you had on, was leading from Circle. A little bit after launch, I wasn't involved in the early launch because I was in London. I would raise my hand and I said, I'm so interested in this because you go back to what I was joining crypto for. I love Coinbase for trading and all these things, but that wasn't my interest. My interest was like, how do we solve moving money across borders?

How do we solve Moving money globally. And I thought, wow, because you don't have to deal with the Bitcoin volatility or the other crypto volatility is very interesting to me, right? And so soon after the launch, I just raised my hands like we didn't really have a lead to grow USDC. It's the last year of my Coinbase was even though I was in London, I flew to the Bay Area a lot was leading. Even leading other stablecoin initiatives, rest in peace to LibraDM, if you've heard of that initiative.

I was Coinbase representative for that, but it was really tough at the beginning. Vishal was my counterpart at Circle and we were trying to grow it, but Tether at that point had gotten such adoption. And so actually when I left Coinbase a year later, I actually felt we didn't succeed in getting USDC off the ground. Because when you looked at the market cap, I can't even remember now, it was a few million versus Tether was already in the hundreds of millions.

If not, I don't think it was at a billion yet, but it was in the hundreds of millions and just wasn't really taking off. Now, there's a few things to call out there. One, you know, it wasn't the biggest priority for Coinbase at the time. And even Circle, because you have to think back, it was a 0% interest rate environment, right? So no one's making money off the reserves then. Now it's a very lucrative thing. And Coinbase still took the long-term view That was important, but it wasn't a big priority.

And so I thought, man, like, we'll talk about my next journey at Stripe. But one of the reasons I took that jump was I thought a payments company really leaning into the space could be very interesting. Looking back now, two things that Coinbase and Circle did really well, and I think every stablecoin issuer should pay attention to, is that even if you're a payments-focused stablecoin or some other focused stablecoin, if you don't build liquidity for your stablecoin, it's not going to take off.

I mean, I'm sort of putting to the side some of the brands that are launching stablecoins that are less glorified rewards points. For their own ecosystem, but if you're trying to launch a stablecoin for the masses and for the adoption, two things that work well, Coinbase and Circle put liquidity in with their own balance sheet into DeFi protocols. At the time it was Compound and Aave and all these things.

And then Coinbase was obviously a trading venue and they got USDC also listed on other major exchanges like Kraken and Binance, etc. And so fast forward, my next role, I was at Stripe. It was summer of 21. DeFi summer happens and USDC starts to really blow

**Host** (16:32)

up.

**Cyril Mathew** (16:33)

And I was like, oh, okay, maybe some of the things we did actually worked. And it takes a while, but it was a good lesson of what are the important things. Even if you're a payments-focused blockchain, if you don't get the trading volume up, both Tether and USDC grew off trading volume. So I haven't seen another stablecoin that really picked up adoption without that flywheel.

**Host** (16:50)

Thinking more in the terms of like assets under custody held in like stablecoin backed, maybe less volume, but like supply growth dominated by trading.

**Cyril Mathew** (16:59)

Supply growth and volume and movement, right? And so what I mean by movement is, and this starts to get into a little bit of what Latitude is doing. What's important for us when we're trying to move money is how do we get a stablecoin into local currency? And so the best way, at least the two proven ways that Tether and USDC had done that is getting listed on trading venues.

Even if I was Uber driver who got a stablecoin or creator who got a stablecoin and I didn't have a nice off ramp, I can at least go to one of these exchanges that listed Tether and USDC and get it back into fiat. And so that created a little bit of the movement flywheel, which is important. That's the utility story that we'll get into. But the two proven ways for the two biggest stablecoins has been that way. And Paxos, I should give a shout out to, has done that.

Drew Rogers, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live. Drew Rogers, Stabledash Live.

**Host** (18:01)

And the properties of it, the use cases of it, the real like utility of that thing and how it is being used within the business in maybe a way that is like in some ways the first time in history stablecoins are being even thought of in this way. Like you kind of had a front row seat to what regulated stablecoin activity looks like. When you think back to use cases, clients, meetings, like are there moments that stick out to you around, oh, I'm starting to see the bigger picture of what What was that like for you?

Quite frankly, it didn't come at Coinbase. Interesting. So I believed in it at Coinbase.

**Cyril Mathew** (18:50)

And oh, you didn't ask about this, but a lot of the times we were pitching payment-type companies to use a stablecoin. We thought it could move faster. You have these settlement windows. Again, I use Wise every week, by the way. I still have my UK bank account. I move funds between them with Wise. It works well. But when I talk to companies like them, they laughed at us. Stablecoin is like, why the heck would we use this?

Again, the part that I was missing was the plumbing we were laying would really have dividends later. When I say plumbing, I mean the licensing part, both Circle and Coinbase took that seriously. We'd even set up a consortium for governance. It ended up, you know, now it's a little bit of sort of a rivalry there, but oh, we could talk about that later. But thinking about liquidity in deep ways, all these building blocks that we were doing, that we believed in, we paid dividends later.

And so again, fast forwarding a little bit, I was at Stripe, I'm leading my team there. The eye-opening piece to me was Stripe actually when I joined Crypto was banned there, and I would love to talk more about that, but the eye-opening thing for me is the Collison's and leadership there took notice because of how much USDC was growing then. They were like, okay, stablecoins, I see some value here for payments. The other thing was the adoption of these performant blockchains, right? I'm a big Bitcoiner.

I believe Bitcoin has good value. I don't believe that it's the best thing for payments. And Ethereum was there with super high gas fees. L2s were just starting, but Solana had started getting adoption, right? Avalanche, a few of these others. And so I could see Stripe leadership, and I think analogous to other non-crypto native companies, we're starting to see, okay, stablecoins, and now blockchains that are actually cheap and fast. I can see how these things works out,

**Host** (20:15)

right? And you're kind of in the room as they were thinking through that in some ways.

**Cyril Mathew** (20:19)

For sure, yeah, and would love to double click there. But you asked when I saw it at Coinbase, I actually didn't see it fully at Coinbase. And I actually left there thinking, man, I wish we could have done better on USDC, right? But it was a lesson to kind of anyone building in the space. Sometimes these things take a while. And I think if you have conviction, you're doing it the right way, it could pay off, even though that right way is methodical licensing, all these things.

One more thing I'd mention is, It wasn't just that. The industry needed to pay attention. There's some other big tailwinds that have been talked ad nauseam now, such as Genius Passing. So Clear Regulation was the other tailwind that the space needed, and that didn't come even until much later.

**Host** (20:52)

I can't imagine the moment, because zooming into the moment that you left, Tether was exploding in volume, but facing a lot of gray area with regulations in some ways. The real moment for USDC hadn't really, really happened yet, but you guys were laying all this super, super crucial groundwork that has ultimately been the main differentiator for that asset. And it's interesting to see that looking back.

**Cyril Mathew** (21:17)

What would you tell yourself? Managing reserves was the other point, how you did managing reserves, which the Circle team and other Like BNY was like a huge part of that. Exactly, getting it in a very trusted custodian, doing audits before they were acquired, all those things, sorry.

**Host** (21:30)

Yes, like kind of knowing where the puck is going and operating as if it's already there. Correct, yeah. Interesting. Any other things from the Coinbase era that stick out to you other than meeting the shawl?

**Cyril Mathew** (21:43)

There's other great people who are supporting it. Shout out to Shannon, Max, Jim, all them, Emily, who's supporting you see it at Coinbase. Just the other thing that I learned coming in, which is if you don't make the UX and the user experience simple, people aren't going to adopt it. And that lesson continued to resonate at my next stops. But how do I get USDC? How do I spend it? How do I off ramp it? How do I on ramp it? All these things. It's still a case today, by the way, which we'll get into.

It's not all the way there, but like, if I don't make it super simple to where my parents or my grandparents could use it, then we haven't quite won yet. It shouldn't, you know, that's one of the other things that I've been playing crypto is getting my seed phrase, you know, downloading my whatever wallet, and it can't be that complex.

**Host** (22:19)

Yeah. Okay. So for utility phase, 2021, you joined Stripe. You described this kind of first real attempt at using Stablecoins for payouts. Speak a little bit to that story and what you learned through that.

**Cyril Mathew** (22:31)

Yeah, I mean, utility,

**Host** (22:33)

it

**Cyril Mathew** (22:33)

feels

**Host** (22:33)

like

**Cyril Mathew** (22:33)

they're kind of

**Host** (22:34)

in the utility. We're still in the utility phase. Yeah, thankfully. And we probably hopefully will be for a while. But we've kind of reached this moment of like, where do these things really fit in?

**Cyril Mathew** (22:42)

For sure. I would be remiss not to mention a quick part of the journey to get it launched at Stripe when I mentioned, and again, this is not saying everyone at Stripe was anti-crypto or anything like that. But when I got there, crypto was banned still. What I did, and maybe the lesson of people who are trying to get things launched to companies, and I actually Pinchai Sheffield, who I consider my friend, I was like, how did you get Visa to do so much in crypto?

And he went through a little of his playbook about getting execs to use it and all these things. And so we brainstormed a bit. And I realized that Stripe was so big on documentation culture. They're so thoughtful sometimes with 220-page docs on everything we do, no slides. And so I thought, I'm one one-hundredth of the writer of the causes, but I thought, I'm sort of the crypto guy here. There weren't many that were experienced in crypto.

And I wrote this 20-page document on what I think we were going to miss out on if we weren't in crypto and stablecoins in these chains. And I laid out use cases and all these things. Again, the paper, going back to it, probably a lot of it was wrong.

**Host** (23:32)

What were the kind of core elements of this paper? Like, how did you even approach it? Maybe what were some of the things that were wrong and maybe some of the things that were really right?

**Cyril Mathew** (23:39)

Yeah, I think the main thing I was pointing out that since the time they had tried Bitcoin payments, I think back in 1560 with Coinbase, ironically, I think it was ripe with fraud. No one was using it. My big point was how much has changed. Just because you tried it then doesn't mean that it's the same thing now. And I called out stablecoins. I was pushing USDC, but I mentioned Tether as well. I called out these new fast blockchains so you can do things cheaper and faster.

I called out a lot of companies that were growing at the time. You know, obviously, Paxos, Coinbase. There was like OnRamps that were starting to get adoption, MoonPay, and these others. And I called out all the major brands that were starting to adopt stables in some way. Visa started dabbling in settlements. PayPal was launching their own stablecoin. And so I thought, at minimum, we should be We were trialing things and piloting things to see if it's a faster way.

And I also knew one of the weak points of Stripe's footprint at the time was international. We were in many countries, but we were really only solid in Europe and the US. In Asia and LATAM, we weren't that strong. So I thought, wow, stablecoins could be an interesting way to get launched in these markets and get adoption quickly versus going country by country and bank by bank. And so those are a few things I outlined. Somehow that paper got to John Collison's desk.

I think his chief of staff, Matt Ziegler, caught it read it with me because i want john to read this and then john did a one-on-one with me asked me a lot a lot of things about my past roles and the cultures of these companies uh will you go into that another day but he's like sir i'd love you to like set up this time and figure out who the industry leaders i need to meet in the space because i think it's worth exploring now And so I set up time with John and, you know, Chad and Walter at Paxos with Brian Brooks, who at the time was Binance with XOCC, Jesse at Kraken, even some where John was very astute.

We set up time with, you know, no shade to BlockFi, but we had a call there and he was like, I don't know that this model will work. So he was very astute on what would work and not. And credit to him, he was like, this seems different now. Oh, we met the Solana team. And

**Host** (25:24)

who's not going to take that call? Right.

**Cyril Mathew** (25:26)

Oh, that's why it was gold for me. I can ping out to any CEO and I said, Hey, I'm representing John Collison. Do you want to meet? And then I'm a fly on the wall. 10 for 10 outreach. Exactly. It was the easiest cold outreach I'd ever had to do. I didn't even ask for warm intros. What was

**Host** (25:40)

his approach? You on the calls with him? I'm curious, like most of them. For a guy like that, I've never met with him, but what was his, something you've mentioned even in this conversation, I keep hearing about them, is their approach to learning and being acquisitive. Like what was he like in those calls? What was his

**Cyril Mathew** (25:53)

posture? That's why I was so impressed. It was just generally, even if in a call like the BlockFi one where maybe he didn't believe it as much, he was just like, tell me how it works. You know, what's the model behind it? With Paxos, like, why do you issue stablecoins this way, right? And how do you get adoption of set stablecoins? It was just asking questions, asking questions, asking questions, and they wanted to know how Stripe can use it. He's like, I'm not sure yet. I'm just fact-finding right now, right?

He definitely said, we're thinking about it. Here's some thoughts we have. He would always put me on the spot and say, Cyril, what are some of the things you think that are synergies? Obviously, they all wanted to say, we can support your entry into crypto, right? So they were always trying to sell. But I just found how inquisitive he was and how quickly he got things. We had another call with the Bitcoin Lightning team just to explore that. He understood it more than me after one call.

**Host** (26:34)

Is there a certain call or like theme or part of the conversation that he really gravitated toward or anything that you were like even I can't even imagine like being on these calls and hearing how he thinks and seeing what he finds interesting and valuable in the stack like is there anything that stood out to him that maybe ultimately led into the strategy that they've now implemented with some of these big acquisitions?

**Cyril Mathew** (26:55)

Yeah, I mean, I'm probably even forgetting a few of the things. The two things that stood out because it led what we eventually did at Stripe with the crypto was just like, okay, stablecoins seemed to have enough adoption. Genie still hadn't passed yet, to be clear. But that was enough for Stripe so we could take a bet here. And he wasn't too keen on like, okay, even the Circle team, he respected a lot, but pushed USDC on us. The other team pushed USDC on us, like, He's not too keen on the tribal nature of crypto.

I remember he didn't like that. And even though he's very impressed with the Solana team, he was like, I don't want to be one chain or anything like that. And kind of based on what you see now, even after I left, you see that.

**Host** (27:24)

It's more of an open standard, I think, is what you're

**Cyril Mathew** (27:26)

saying. No pun intended, exactly. How open it is, is debatable. I think Stripe still is very strategic on how they do things and make sure they keep business. But the two things were like, okay, blockchain seemed to have changed from just Bitcoin and Ethereum, and there's cheaper way to do things now, faster way to do things now, and stablecoins seem to have adoption. Those two things were resonating with him. I don't know if I necessarily want to go with one of these tribes or do one of the things with them.

And we ended up partnering with a few of those companies, to be clear. But those are the two things that stood out. And it was enough conviction that even though there was, again, no shade. I love being a Stripe alumni, but there are so many people within Stripe who are anti doing anything in the space. Even when you fast forward, I wasn't sure, and I really wanted to still be in the space. I wasn't sure if we're going to do something.

And John eventually assigned Will Gabrick, who's the president of Stripe, said, OK, we're going to launch something. We brought in the head of engineering, GM, and I was able to partner with him to launch something. And when we announced we're going to do something, which we'll talk about payouts, which you asked about, and I rambled to get there. No,

**Host** (28:18)

it's good. So the payouts was like the thing. They're like, OK, go do this.

**Cyril Mathew** (28:21)

Yeah, payouts was the thing. But when we announced we're going to do anything, so many people in Slack and our all hands were like, why are we doing stuff? It's ripe with fraud, all of these things. And then at the minimum, I was arguing we should at least just process payments for crypto exchanges that are reputable, like Coinbase and all these. And to me, I also helped do the FTX deal, which maybe wasn't the right one in terms of processing payments for them, nothing else.

And so I was arguing, at minimum, we should do that, but we can even do more. So given those themes that John heard, he was like, fast forward, we're launching a very small crypto unit within Stripe to do some small pilots. And we decided, okay, we have so many marketplaces on Stripe. Lyft, Airbnb was on Stripe, even Uber in certain parts.

So all these companies that were using Stripe Connect, for those who don't know Stripe Connect, an easy way for creators to be onboarded, a business that's in the US that has creators around the world. How do I deal with KYC? How do I deal with payments? Stripe built Connect for this purpose to onboard these users. But Stripe was limited in its Connect platform where we can only pay out in about 50-ish countries where we had banking rails. But there's 200 countries in the world.

And so how do we do payouts for the creators in the rest of the world? And so our first thesis was, let's do a pilot where we can do USDC payouts to 100 plus countries. And so that was the first product we launched. We did it on pilot with actually Twitter, the pre-Elon Musk Twitter. They had like the super tipping feature and creators around the world and we launched it. We were excited about it despite all the anti-narrative within it. But when we launched the product, it hardly was used.

Like no one was using it and we were like, hmm. And Stripe's very big on user research and asking users why and what. And so when we were polling users, I'll paraphrase, it was like, what do I do with USDC in Vietnam? What do I do it in Ghana? What do I do with it in Columbia? I need to buy groceries and coffee and local things for my family. And so if it's not usable there, I mean, there's a growing population that want USD stables. And especially now, that was back in 21, 22, it's a lot more.

But I still have a core thesis, and this was the spark for me launching Latitude, even though I had one more stop in between, was if this will work to solve global payments or improve global payments, I do not have the thesis that a US dollar stablecoin will be used by everyone in the world. I still think the Brazilian real will exist. I still think the Indian rupee will exist. I think the Chinese yuan will exist. So you've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies with stablecoins.

And that was the light bulb for me. And I think they've launched other iterations of that that I'm sure are more widely used. I know in Argentina, a lot of people love USD stablecoins, but I still have a core conviction based on a lot of experience that people need to get in and out of local currencies if this is really viable, aka a settlement network currency. That was the big thing. That's why I call it utility. It lacked that utility to

**Host** (30:51)

be usable. Since then, a lot of really interesting leaps have happened in the utility conversation. How do you think about maybe since then the big shifts like the macro things that have happened in recent years with the utility of stablecoins and what we've seen, but also some of that initial pain that still exists that is still really driving a lot of sounds like kind of bringing us into latitude now.

What are some of the macro things that have happened and then bring us into what you're now building with that spark?

**Cyril Mathew** (31:17)

Yeah, I mean, I spent a little time in Zerohash and I saw this too, where the other lesson was like a lot of these platforms, even if they adopt stables, they don't want to hold on to it. So it's very important that you reduce that complexity for the business. The other part I glossed over with Stripe is in addition to off-ramping, I need some crypto wallet to use this. Do I go download MetaMask and all these things? So that part was complicated.

**Host** (31:37)

You always lose a lot of people when you make them do

**Cyril Mathew** (31:39)

that. Go download it or go to an exchange and do that. I was like, well, obviously going to have a steep drop off, right? Yes. And so fast forward to what our thesis is in Latitude and all the utility that's happened. There's been a lot that's happened. The Genius Act passed, and so regulated clear ways for people to hold stables. But even then, most brands want someone else to do that stable holding custody money movement for them.

There's been all sorts of these wallet providers, a Privy, a Turnkey, Crossman and others, who have made the spinning up of these wallets easier and more usable there's been these card issuers i give a little shout out to myself for doing the first one back in 2020 or so for a crypto debit card but rain and bridge issued these cards for a number of these stablecoin cards that are taking off and so if i have a card in said market i could spend that stable coin but going back to what i said there's a lot of markets that don't have cards and there still is a cross-border charge if you're spending a card from one market into another market right or paying out right And so even though there's been more on utility, what I still saw as a gap before I launched Latitude was I didn't see any of the providers that have solved, at least in 40 or 50 plus countries, how to get from a stable to a local currency.

How do I settle, right? And two great companies that have been acquired, Bridge and BVNK, great companies, regulated, I'm friends with both of them. If you look at their footprint outside the US and Europe, there's not much there. There's a few countries, right? And I think that's by their strategic design. That's not anything bad of them. And then you look at the other point, it's like there's all these new stablecoin native companies, and they've started to solve some of these international markets.

But what I saw with them is they didn't do what Coinbase did, and they didn't do what some of the other companies who would just get the licenses first. What they're doing is a lot of them are built on top of bridge, so they rent the licenses. A lot of them are Using a Bank Sponsor. And these are good ways to get out to market, and I'm going into the weeds a little bit.

But what it means is if you're truly going to compete and displace the incumbents for cross-border payments, I feel you've got to own your own destiny. That means you have your own licensing, you control your own economics. And Latitude, in our year and a half journey, now we're at about 45 state approvals with MTLs and state approvals, which is pretty record time, I believe, in a year and a half. And then, so you control your own destiny there, your economics.

You have compliance in-house, so you figure out how you onboard clients, and we should get into compliance in a second because it's still a huge bottleneck. And then internationally, we believe we're building a settlement network that is really differentiated, right? Some just go to small exchanges and you can off ramp. I believe you have to have banks as part of the network. We're onboarding with two banks in Brazil. I believe you need great exchanges as part of the network. Bits as an investor, we have them.

I believe you need even payment aggregators as part of your network. We have a DLocal and others. And so we have a number of partners in Mexico. We have four or five different partners for a settlement that we can route and optimize for, right? And so we're still early. We've got several design users, but what we believe we're doing is building for the long term and solving this gap where I can truly be global on day

**Host** (34:13)

one. Right. Maybe it would be interesting to double click on one of these places like Mexico you brought up. It sounds like that's kind of an early market. How you are piecing these things together in the categories you just mentioned and why having all of them friendly and working well together matters versus maybe some of these other approaches you've seen. When you think about what this cohort put together on locks, what is now possible with Latitude

**Cyril Mathew** (34:38)

today

**Host** (34:38)

and in the future?

**Cyril Mathew** (34:39)

Let's go into Mexico. I believe that's a great deep dive. I'm talking in high level terms. I should just double click. It's like the way this manifests in two products for us. Our first is this global fiat payouts, we call it. A business in the US that wants to pay out its creators like we were trying to do with Stripe can do it in stablecoins, but they can get to fiat, aka the stablecoin sandwich. So we can pay out to Philippines, to Mexico, to India, all in under two minutes, all in real time.

We use a stablecoin to move the money, but a local partner to off ramp it. But you just onboard at latitude and it works seamlessly. We've got Podcasting platform like Zencastr Live on it, Velo CFO, etc. The second product using the same sort of infrastructure is a settlement network or a simplified term is on and off ramps.

**Host** (35:15)

And so if I'm a neobank, all these neobanks are launching, I'm

**Cyril Mathew** (35:17)

trying to be global on day one, or I'm trying to just get into one market. But if I'm trying to get to 40 markets, Am I going to go plug into on and off ramp providers in all markets or our goal is you come to Latitude and we'll have all the currencies there for you. You onboard once, you can get from Mexico Peso to Stablecoins. So let's double click on Mexico for both of those products.

If I'm a platform that wants to do payouts across the globe, but Mexico is a very important market for me, Mexico is a more robust and liquid one, and so it's a good one. There's less robust ones we should talk about in terms of liquidity not being as mature. But what Latitude can do is take the dollars because we're regulated. We have bank sponsors and it's custodied in a regulated, efficient way. Mint a stablecoin, which is near free, going from dollars to stablecoin near free, so really no cost there.

Let's say we're sending on a blockchain. Let's say it's sending on Solana, also near free, so no cost there. So there's one cost component, which is getting that stablecoin back to Mexico Peso if they want to deliver pesos. And so for Latitude, if we have three or four partners as part of that network, all compliant and regulated, we've collected the KYB on the user, we've done our checks on the contractor, so compliance is built in, and we've worked that out, we can now route to who has the best liquidity.

And that's important, right? Liquidity, the term that's thrown out there a lot, but if you're doing $100 or $200 payments may not matter as much, but if you're doing $5 or $6 million payments, that matters. Or even on a $100 payment, If an off-ramp provider is charging 1% on a $100 payment, you're losing $1, right? Or 3% or 4%. And so the reason having redundancy matters is that we can route to the cheapest route to get to Mexico peso.

And then the last thing I'll throw on, the boring stuff, I'll throw on our Stripe DNA. My co-founder, CTO Brian, is from Stripe as well. It's like, we get the boring stuff right. If the payment fails, how do we retry it and pick the other provider to make sure it delivers? And that all happens in buy and see, right? Interesting. So you're building really a network of

**Host** (36:59)

networks.

**Cyril Mathew** (37:01)

Network of network is a great term.

**Host** (37:02)

Yeah, like you'll go within a specific corridor, build a network there, and then eventually that becomes a really interesting network of networks.

**Cyril Mathew** (37:10)

Correct, and one that's abstracted from the user. Like what happened back in the day, or even some stable companies I see now is, okay, hey, brand, you want to pay out? Here's the four providers you go, and we built the API for them, but you still have to onboard with all of them, and you have to do your own checks with all of them. That's too clunky. We have to be like, you onboard Latitude, on the back end, we're doing this routing with our network. Interesting, right? Interesting.

**Host** (37:29)

What is the different roles that each of these different pieces play in your mind? It sounds like options, network effects, routing. Like you have, I know I saw like Morse and Sling Money is like on the cap table. Like you have a platform like that. You have a bank. What types of roles do each of these specific market makers, like what do they all play? Why all of them?

**Cyril Mathew** (37:50)

yeah great question we found again we're early we're a year and a half in we've built the connectivity if i say countries it's 50 because it includes europe but for the fiat payouts product almost up to 20 currencies now including europe with just 20 countries and on the on and off ramps we're building up to 10 currencies on and off ramps a little more difficult because you have to build virtual account infrastructure we can double click there in a second that's relative to morse but what it means is like first for the payouts product you have to have reliable banking partners in the us to take dollars and make sure that's Custody, all the safeguards in place where people don't even trust you.

You have to do the boring stuff as well, like SOC 2 and all these things that we're doing, right? And then when we use our network of networks, people want to make sure, one, that it's going to deliver fast and reliable, but second, it's going to be affordable and cheap. So one thing we've done today, which we feel is still basic, is we just route between different providers. And so if the exchange is the better route, we'll go that way. If the bank is a better route, we'll go that way.

What we're doing in phase two is introducing even more competition into that middle phase, and I'll give one example. Right now, we may either get regulated in one of these markets internationally, we're going to continue to get regulated, or we may find a bank partner that just does the payout. And in between, what we do, and we mentioned OpenFX as one of our Series A investors, they're doing this core infrastructure of market making on stablecoins in several markets, in Mexico, in Europe.

And so they're getting that stable to Mexico cost basis down to a few basis points, one or two basis points down from what may have been 10 or 15 or higher in other markets. And so we can plug in OpenFX to get liquidity very, very, shout out to them, right? It won't always be them, so I'm not the second only player like them, but we get that cost so low, and then we just have a small payout cost, all of a sudden, We're doing costs so much cheaper than incumbents can do it, right?

A lot of the incumbents I see in the space are like, oh, well, it's so cheap. Cost of capital is not important. Use one of these platforms, Wiser or Mintly, and go U.S. to Colombia, U.S. to Philippines, U.S. to India, these emerging markets. The rates start to go to 3%, 4%.

**Host** (39:38)

I tried doing Wise to one of our teammates in India. I told you, it was really painful. Funds released, I still don't kind of know why. The held funds, how to get it back took like a week.

**Cyril Mathew** (39:47)

Yeah, and our first few mark clients we've won from partners like that going to India, going to markets like the Philippines. And so in these emerging markets is where you see these problems come more acutely. Now, let me throw a shot at the stablecoin side of the house. Some people's stablecoins act like it's solved everywhere. It's going to be cheaper everywhere, faster everywhere. That's not true yet.

There's a lot of markets where whether it's not clear regulation or they're just not an open FX there, or there's not a bit so there, the liquidity is not there yet. Many of the African markets, many of the Southeast Asian markets. And so they're a wiser. There is

**Host** (40:16)

a painful, like what countries specifically feel like there's a really awful opportunistic relationship with pain and opportunity and also size. What are the key markets that you're like, damn, if we could actually get that unlocked, this would be huge.

**Cyril Mathew** (40:28)

Markets that work well, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Philippines, clear regulation, good liquidity. Again, this may not be scaling to a billion dollars B2B payments yet liquidity, but at least for B2C. There's a machine

**Host** (40:39)

that's working there.

**Cyril Mathew** (40:40)

Yeah, and it's growing. Right. And again, for someone who's going to attack me saying, well, you can't do huge treasury movements there. I get that. It's still maturing. And I'm not arguing that it's all the way there. But markets that are huge that yet don't have that infrastructure, Indonesia. How big is the population there? Thailand, maybe not as big of a population. Pakistan, Bangladesh. There's some solutions there.

We're actually working on one with the local Pakistani player now, but huge populations, huge remittance corridors. And we don't have your stablecoin in for liquidity. And Japan is a major market, not necessarily considered emerging because regulation and banks that are doing some stuff there, not clear on an off ramp in for us.

So a bunch of these Southeast Asian markets, Nigeria has got there, but a lot of the other African markets still a little bit painful, even though there's players like Flutterwave, YellowCard that are doing So there's all these huge population markets that don't have the proper inference. That's what we're trying to go.

Either we're going to go try to solve it if there is an exchange and someone to be a network of networks play there, or we may go get licensed or we may find a local bank partner and help bring the market maker there. I think all of those options are on the table for us, right?

**Host** (41:38)

So this is the best part of the chat where like, I don't know, most of the people had stuck around for the big announcement and now the real, like the nerds are still here. You know, you've just closed this round. Congrats. I don't think I said that in the beginning. Thank you. It's not easy to do that. You speak to a lot of investors, really, really even forward looking. Like if you think about a VC, like VCs are paid to make good decisions, but also research, like where is this all going? Yeah.

You've just finished talking to dozens and dozens of these people. Like, what were some of these key themes that were common misconceptions about latitude? Things that you think maybe a handful of them might not be getting yet? Like, what were some of these things that might be misunderstood or things that you heard thematically that you want to just like, hey, this is, here's the truth? Shout

**Cyril Mathew** (42:22)

out to VC Friends. We ran into one on the way here. Yes, we did. Leon's Bagels. I hate fundraising, but it's a necessary part of the business. But at the same time, I appreciate you need the capital to grow. You know, one thing is the process, our seed investment, very supportive during this process. He was coaching us through raising the Series A and Even though it ended up only taking us about three to four weeks end to end, he was like, dude, you're getting in the door with all these major investors.

You're getting second meetings. They're all meeting with you in person. He was saying, be patient. You're being impatient because this thing usually takes three or four months for the amount of money you're asking for, especially with our early you are. But with that in mind, our approach was like, let's meet everyone in person, back to back, New York, Bay Area, and then as many we can get in person. And so it was grueling. The other thing we did is we went aggressive.

And we didn't get aggressive just to be aggressive. We got aggressive because our strategy we felt long term will be differentiated. And again, I've glossed on in here, but to just over summarize is like, Getting regulated on quote-unquote day one was very important and we had a lot to show for it over the 40 plus states approved, now 45. Building a network that's differentiated. It's not completely there yet. We saw the building blocks.

We had banks part of the networks exchanges and the network of network strategy. And then our team. You know, we're not the 20-year-old YC startups and I love those times, but we're a little bit more gray-haired and we had experience from Stripe, Coinbase, Uber. But it also meant we've seen how to scale these places, scale internationally like an Uber, like a Stripe with payouts. And so I think the combination of those things was what we were going in with.

The tough part and so was that because we took this methodical approach first to get regulated first, we had great early design users and we had a really strong pop of still do with major enterprises as part of it. But we weren't raising with 5 million ARR or 10 million ARR. It wasn't a revenue story yet. But we did that. We told our seed investors that's what we were going to do. We're going to build a working product. We could settle in 50 countries under two minutes.

The challenging part was that there's been so many stablecoin cross-border companies. So that's challenging part number one.

**Host** (44:04)

How do you differentiate

**Cyril Mathew** (44:05)

between all of them?

**Host** (44:06)

And it's hard to explain. Even me doing it on this podcast in long form,

**Cyril Mathew** (44:10)

it's sort of hard to resonate. The fact that no one's first built the rule US regulation, no one's second built this international network, and that is network of networks. And third, there's this team that has to know how to do it, how to get into markets, how to gruel and operate. And so that's what we have to show investors of.

And I think some of the ones that pass, Passing very politely, one of them even called us the Avengers of the Stablecoins, our team, Avengers of the Stablecoin era, but we'd like to see a little bit more revenue traction first. Well, the lesson for us was Rick being a supporter for us in the seed phase is like, if we were raising 15 to 20 million, I think we would have gotten it done in three or four days. But we were asking for 35 because we felt licensing is still going to be important.

Again, go back to the Coinbase story you were asking me. They didn't just do it in the US. They hired me and others in Europe to do it there and other markets. And so we know we're going to have to do something very similar. We know that's going to be painful. We can do it more efficient in the age of AI. We may not need 20 compliance people. We can use three or four and put AI tools at the disposal.

**Host** (44:59)

We need to keep talking about this country-specific go-to-market.

**Cyril Mathew** (45:02)

I gotta keep that in mind.

**Host** (45:04)

Talk more about that.

**Cyril Mathew** (45:04)

Country by country, bit by bit, you know, and so that capital is needed. If we didn't raise that capital, we couldn't really grow in the way we wanted, right? And so having a thesis-driven investor like Oak was very important. We had a few others that were similar that were competitive in the process, but we felt Oak Who had been a part of Circle and Paxos early, who'd been a part of Bridge, who's improved in a lot of fintechs.

We felt having a partner who understood what we're trying to do and was patient, patient in the short term, patient in the long term is a term that we use internally to say, we've got to move fast, but we've got to do it the right way, right? We move with urgency. We take that Uber launching mentality, but we still want to do it the right way.

Getting licensed, building the network, Because if we're going to win enterprises, the one thing that I found with anyone who's claiming to do stable and cross-border, again, BVNK are good companies, they do a lot of enterprises, but I haven't seen enterprises do cross-border volume with any major stablecoin companies. And I believe we'll be one to crack that. If we can do that, and why do we do that? Again, licensing, compliance, all of that in-house.

And if we can do that the right way, we believe we can win enterprises, which is the real long-term price. That's what Oak wants, right? You can serve these big brands, you know, the deals doing everything, and eventually Visa, Zelle announced Stablecoins, all these big brands is who you really want to enable to support, while still supporting small businesses, to be clear. That's a big part of our ethos. That was the important part of fundraising for me. It did take a lot of patience.

My co-founder, Vivek, was asking me, how do you become so patient and calm during all these rejections that were happening? And, you know, I think one is I'm faith-driven and it's not the most important for me. I'm family-driven, but I believe we're doing the right thing and the right thesis-driven investment with content. That proved to be true with Oak. So,

**Host** (46:37)

yeah.

**Cyril Mathew** (46:38)

That's

**Host** (46:39)

really good. So, when did you formally start the company? It's been how long now?

**Cyril Mathew** (46:43)

I mean, we incorporated in late 24, but we finished the race in Jan of 25. So it's been about a little over a year and a half. And we just closed the Series A three, four months ago. Came out of stealth three, four months ago as well. We did those things at the same time.

**Host** (46:54)

As you've built the business and you've seen this thesis that you've had, the initial spark, be right.

**Host** (47:07)

What is it like being right, but also seeing others and their approach also kind of point toward this direction? How does it feel as a founder to feel the validation of like, hey, we're going in the right direction, but also potentially see, okay, there are others who are maybe taking a similar approach, like we're not the only ones, like what's the vibe like right now?

**Cyril Mathew** (47:29)

The one thing I would push back on respectfully, I'm going to channel someone who I admire a lot. Rest in peace, Kobe Bryant. Job's not finished. We haven't won. I don't think we're right yet. I do believe our hypothesis is right, and I have conviction on it. We're far from having proven it. I just want our team to remember that.

That's something I say internally, like, We're still so early, and I don't mean that to be cliche, but getting to your point, which I think we were going for, is our validation of our hypothesis. What I firmly believe, and there's other players going to do this, and it's not a winner-take-all market, is the only thing stopping us from succeeding is our execution ability.

And so the validation, what I see is we're literally getting referrals from a lot of the wallet providers, a lot of the L1 blockchains and saying, we have clients that want to use either our wallets or they want to get live on said blockchain, but they lack off ramps in all these markets. And they're coming to us, Latitude, can you solve it? We heard you're moving fast, right?

There's regional players to be clear who offer these offerings, but I haven't seen a global player that does it in a regular way and a network of networks way. And so that's huge validation. I think validation from the investors who talk to customers every day and said, I see that clearly as a gap. And so it's validating and it's going back to all these experiences that we walked through that sort of formed that hypothesis for us. And I would say the big challenge for us is how can we execute fast enough?

The exact player, the exact solution in every of these markets I mentioned in Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan may not exist today. And so that's still the challenging part. While I'm validated on we need the off-ramps everywhere, we need the stablecoin settlements everywhere, how do you go solve that market by market? So that's the biggest undertaking for us I think going forward.

**Host** (49:02)

Is that where you, like going back to that point of like these big markets that seem painful but untapped, is that really where you think the biggest opportunity lies? And what are you doing about that right now? How do you actually unbundle that problem?

**Cyril Mathew** (49:15)

I think the two sides of it is make sure you have the coverage in the markets that have had maturity and a global coverage. And so that's part one of what we've been doing. We're not all the way there yet. Part two is these difficult markets that may not yet have a solution. The regulation may not be clear. And so that's where we're going to channel. One of my co-founders is Brian, CTO of Stripe. My other co-founders are Vivek Morzaria. He worked with me at Uber and Zerohash.

We're going to channel a little bit of that TK. From Uber, that Uber launcher mentality is how do we get people in the market that are experienced to know how to launch in that market and just figure out ways to get in there, like find the bank partner that's more forward thinking, build a playbook. You know, some of these markets, even in advance of clear regulation, the central banks will give authority to the bank to do this activity, right? India is a good example of that.

There's a few players through exchanges that are able to do on and off ramps. There's not a clear genius type framework there. And so how do you get creative in this Uber launcher style mentality to get into these markets, to figure out that bank that's forward moving, to do it in a, again, approved way, but do it in a way that we're understanding that region, we understand that local market.

And so phase two, now that we have the capital, is getting these launcher type mentalities to go in and figure out these playbooks and repeat that and going on. We saw that at Uber work really well. Not apples to apples because Uber wasn't moving money and so the regulation is different, but that mentality of building that playbook, feeling the pain, getting in quickly, acting with urgency is sort of what this next phase of Latitude is.

**Host** (50:35)

It's so exciting. Okay, so next phase of Latitude is we kind of turn the corner here. When you think about success, we talk a year from now, what needs to be true for you to be really excited or satisfied? You said Kobe Bryant, so maybe you'll never be satisfied. What are some really key goals as you guys end the year and kind of kick off this like huge window of execution phase for the business? And how can the listeners and people who are like tuned into this conversation help you guys accelerate?

What are the goals and what do you need?

**Cyril Mathew** (51:04)

Great question. I keep saying impatient in the short term, patient in the long term. There's been these companies that built these global networks in the fiat side that took 10 years to do it, right? And so we do need to understand it takes a while to build this sort of network. But in mid-2027, I would say we want to be live in 30 plus currencies around the world, maybe up to 50 for the off ramps. We want to have licensing built in the US and several other markets where we're the licensed local player.

And then we want to have You know, now we've built a lot of the infrastructure. We should have several enterprises using us. And when they use us, there's a very important point. I think this is one of the hot takes we talked about off the record. One thing I see enterprises doing when they get into the space is what we did with Stripe is like, oh, their stablecoins are cool. They're getting adopted. I'm going to pay out my contractor or my freelancer or my business in a stablecoin.

And I talk to all these brands today and I'm like, how's that going for you? I have a billion in my, let's just say it's a billion in my core flows. What's your stable and payout flows? They're like less than half a percent or half a half a percent. If you had an off ramp for those flows, I believe that could grow into at least 5%, if not 10%. So it's important to say when you have a logo that's an enterprise on your website, it's good. And we want that of course, but we want to be in our core flows.

We want to be in the core flow of how you move money to pay your vendors. We want to be in the core flow for how you pay out your contractors, end up in fiat, not just end up in a stablecoin, right? We want to be in the core flow where if you're building a global Venmo, they're not thinking about their seed facing crypto wallet. It's just simple.

It's been paid out either in their wallet and it looks like a dollar and it happens to be a crypto wallet, but it looks like a Web2 wallet, or it's paid out in your bank account. And so I would say success in 27 is Network of Networks Regulation is coming along, but we have enterprises and we're in their core flows, right? Not just these vanity stablecoin pilots, right? I think those are cool. I love them, but in core flows is how Latitude really disrupts.

**Host** (52:51)

Yeah. Are these conversations from your experience typically like, hey, you have this flow going on?

**Cyril Mathew** (52:57)

Yeah.

**Host** (52:57)

Give us like part of it so we can kind of prove our value. It always starts that way where

**Cyril Mathew** (53:01)

I'm under no impressions that someone's going to say, oh, I'm going to do 100% of my volume with you overnight. And we're happy with that. We're like, give us a percent of your volume. Prove that we can do it. We're confident and reliable. And that's usually how these enterprise conversations start. We'll start with the pilot. You prove it well, we'll go beyond the pilot. And again, I'll just call one more time is why the stablecoin payout only pilots, I never see scale beyond that. Sure.

And so if we start a pilot that says, sir, we'll start with stableman payouts, but we can go beyond that, we think we can actually scale from 1% to 5% to 10% of these enterprise volumes. Listen, everyone in payments still ends up using a few providers, but we believe if we're getting into 10%, 15%, 20% of these enterprise flows, we're really going to disrupt the space. And that's not even thinking about Future, we could talk about agentic or all things, these other new flows that could exist. Sky's the limit.

I'll mention one more Uber anecdote that you didn't ask for, but I'm going to go into is like Uber, when they made taking that taxi experience so much easier, it changed the whole industry. And I'll give you one anecdote. When we were at Uber, they gave the stat that the market cap, if you just look at taxi rides on its own, based on GMV and all of these things, the market cap of the taxi industry in San Francisco was about 200 million. I'm very abbreviating here or sorry, rounding here.

Fast forward six, seven years when I was at Uber, the Uber market cap in San Francisco alone, not just taxis, Uber alone, not Lyft and all, it was $2

**Host** (54:12)

billion.

**Cyril Mathew** (54:13)

Right? And so you made it so much easier to take a ride that you just grew the whole industry. And we believe like, if you make it so much easier for now to do cross-border payments with stables, but still get out to local currencies, just thinking about the current TAM is not thinking big enough. We think this TAM could explode with all these new use cases. And I think that's a very important point. I've seen it firsthand. When you make it easier, you can't even imagine what will grow.

These are use cases you're going to ask me about. I'm talking about neobanks today and contractor payouts. There's something I'm not thinking about next year. And I think that's what Bridge did well, for example. They built an API that people build on. We're doing similar, but globally. And so what are the use cases going to pop on, you know, come out of that global use case, right? I think that's very exciting.

**Host** (54:51)

I find those that really understand the opportunity, they're not thinking just about what's the piece of the pie that exists today that I can win. It's like with this technology and why we're so passionate about covering this is with this technology, the possibilities and the volumes and speed and the competitive edge, anyone who works in payments long enough, trading long enough, whatever the use case is, it's like the edge will go to those who move the fastest for the least amount of money.

And it's just a continuous game of who does that best. We're starting to see, I think that competitive, some of these clients that start using Latitude, they're a competitor seeing that like, oh, like they're moving faster, they're moving cheaper. Like we're just now starting to enter that phase and it's going to be really fun to see that 10X or that Uber style happen. I hope in the next one to three years, like we're going to really start feeling that.

**Cyril Mathew** (55:39)

So I tell our team all the time, like we're early. Sometimes you get a little bit, okay, these conversations take forever. But we're

**Host** (55:44)

not too early. We're not like early where we're like back when the call sends, we're like thinking. Of course, like it's happening, but it's validated.

**Cyril Mathew** (55:50)

Yeah. And that lesson I told you about leaving Coinbase and thinking USDC hadn't grown, I just channeled that internally as like, we're building the building blocks now. I know that growth will come if we execute, right? That's on us to execute.

**Host** (56:01)

Well, Cyril, very, one, grateful for you as a new sponsor of the show, excited to be in the journey with you. Anything as we kind of close that you want to leave the audience with, things that we may have missed or just...

**Cyril Mathew** (56:11)

Yeah, I mean, you asked me a little bit of what we need from people. You know, Latitude, building this global payouts and settlement network with Stablecoins, the two products, fiat payouts. If you're a marketplace that needs payouts globally, Stablecoins or fiat, we can help. If you're a neobank prediction market, Any fintech app that's bringing stables globally into your apps, be on and off ramps, we think we can help.

Ping me, I'm at LatitudeHandles, at RTP on Twitter, Rx, our real-time payments, or at underscore Cyril Mathew, or just ping me, CyrilLatitude.xyz.

**Host** (56:41)

And partners.

**Cyril Mathew** (56:41)

If you're in one of those markets that I mentioned is hard in Japan, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, you're a bank thinking about giving liquidity to stables and doing off ramps, you're a payment provider and you need that right pilot partner or thought partner, we believe we can help. We can help accelerate. So, or investors who know these partners, we would welcome that opportunity. I just want to say thank you for having us on. We're a fan for what you do for the space and how you guys do it.

So appreciate you having us on. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for coming on.

**Host** (57:06)

Cool.

**Cyril Mathew** (57:06)

Thanks. So fun.