Dragonfly and FirstMark Capital led the round. Participating investors include Coinbase Ventures, Ripple, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Activant Capital, and Wintermute Ventures. The raise brings Velocity's total funding to roughly $48 million, following a $10 million pre-seed led by Activant Capital in May 2025 when the company first emerged from stealth. Founded in 2025 by CEO Eric Queathem and co-founder Tom Greenwood, Velocity currently operates in the United States, parts of Europe, and Australia, with regulatory approvals pending for Africa and Latin America.

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What Velocity Actually Does

Velocity sells infrastructure to businesses, not consumers. Its three products cover payments (moving fiat or stablecoins across borders without banking cutoffs), settlement (real-time, around-the-clock finality), and treasury management (programmatic, on-chain capital operations). CEO and co-founder Eric Queathem, who spent nine years at WorldPay leading global strategy, acquisitions, and its crypto and global payouts division, frames the competition as traditional banks and foreign exchange houses rather than other fintechs. Co-founder Tom Greenwood, formerly of McKinsey, rounds out the founding team. New capital will also fund secure asset custody and yield-generating stablecoin products.

"Dragonfly has consistently backed the infrastructure that underpins meaningful shifts in financial markets," Queathem said in a statement. "Their understanding of digital asset ecosystems and long-term perspective on stablecoin adoption make them a strong partner as we build for institutional use cases."

Rob Hadick, a partner at Dragonfly, pointed to a knowledge gap among potential customers as both the problem and the opportunity. Many businesses, he said, "do not understand that they can be using stablecoins to solve their problems." Dragonfly, which manages more than $650 million in its fourth fund, already holds stablecoin-related positions in Ethena, Rain, and Mesh, and co-authored a research report with Artemis and Castle Island Ventures identifying a $94 billion stablecoin payments market.

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The Numbers Behind the Bet

The macroeconomic context for this round is hard to ignore. Total stablecoin supply sits at roughly $313 billion as of June 2026, up 93 percent from approximately $161 billion two years earlier. Stablecoin payments volume hit $9 trillion in 2025, an 87 percent increase from 2024, according to QED Investors co-founder Nigel Morris. B2B transactions account for roughly 60 percent of that volume. Monthly B2B stablecoin flows reached around $6 billion by mid-2025, up from under $100 million per month in early 2023. Visa, through data reported by BVNK, annualized stablecoin settlement at $4.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a figure that illustrates how quickly traditional financial infrastructure is intersecting with digital asset rails.

The investor roster itself carries signal. Capital One Ventures, the venture arm of a top-10 US commercial bank, joining a stablecoin infrastructure round marks a shift from observation to direct participation by legacy financial institutions. Ripple's involvement is particularly layered: the company is simultaneously backing Velocity and participating in the Open USD consortium alongside Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Coinbase, and more than 140 other firms, a posture that suggests it is hedging across multiple stablecoin rails rather than concentrating on a single protocol.

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Why Africa Is the Critical Market to Watch

Velocity has named Africa as an explicit expansion target, and the investor composition helps explain why this is more than a talking point. QED Investors holds direct African fintech exposure through TeamApt, Nigeria's largest business payments platform processing over $100 billion in annualized transactions, and Stitch in South Africa, where QED led a $55 million Series B. Ripple has built payment corridors across Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. Wintermute Ventures, known for market-making in illiquid corridors, rounds out an investor group with genuine operational stakes in the region.

The data supports the strategic logic. Sub-Saharan Africa recorded more than $205 billion in on-chain value between July 2024 and June 2025, a 52 percent year-over-year increase. Nigeria alone accounted for roughly $26 billion in stablecoin volume in 2024 and ranks sixth globally in crypto adoption. Average remittance fees to the region still exceed 6 percent, a cost that stablecoin settlement infrastructure is designed to undercut. QED's Enrique Hausmann put it plainly: "The correspondent banking system will face significant competition as SMBs in LATAM and MEA increasingly settle B2B invoices in USD-denominated stablecoins on layer-2 blockchains, reducing settlement from three days to three seconds."

The regulatory environment is also maturing. South Africa now requires licensing under the Financial Sector Conduct Authority's CASP framework. Kenya enacted crypto legislation in October 2025. Nigeria's Investment and Securities Act 2025 formally recognizes digital assets as securities under SEC oversight. Mauritius, Ghana, and Rwanda are each advancing their own frameworks, and Ethiopia, ranked twelfth in the Global Crypto Adoption Index, signals that institutional momentum is reaching well beyond the continent's largest economies.

For African businesses and developers, the practical question is timing: if Velocity secures the necessary licenses, it would offer a B2B settlement rail connecting stablecoin infrastructure to local banking systems, potentially significant for import and export financing, cross-border payroll, and treasury operations.

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What Comes Next

Velocity enters a competitive field that includes BVNK, Bridge (acquired by Stripe), Conduit (which also counts Dragonfly as a backer and raised its own $36 million Series A), and Ripple itself, whose On-Demand Liquidity product addresses use cases that overlap directly with Velocity's core offering. Ripple's dual role as both a strategic investor in this round and a potential competitor makes for an unusual dynamic, and one worth monitoring as Velocity scales its product footprint and seeks to carve out differentiated positioning.

South Asia remains conspicuously absent from Velocity's stated expansion roadmap despite QED's dedicated India and APAC focus and surging regional adoption. India, the world's top-ranked country for crypto adoption three years running, presents both the largest opportunity and the most complex regulatory environment, where a domestic central bank digital currency coexists with a complex tax environment and regulators who remain cautious about foreign stablecoin infrastructure. Pakistan has already moved further along the regulatory spectrum: its stablecoin sandbox, launched in the fourth quarter of 2025, has approved three providers, establishing a precedent for the broader region. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, each heavily dependent on remittance inflows, represent additional markets underserved by traditional cross-border rails and potentially well-suited to B2B stablecoin settlement.

Whether Velocity moves to address that gap will be one of the more consequential product decisions it faces as the capital is deployed.