Ripple Joins Velocity, Targets Payment Back End With $10 Million Extension

London-based Velocity has raised an additional $10 million, extending its Series A to $48 million at a $200 million post-money valuation, with participation from Visa Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Ripple. The fresh capital will fund infrastructure connecting stablecoins to existing payment networks, settlement systems, and corporate treasury operations.

The extension follows a $38 million Series A announced in July, which CEO Eric Queathem said was oversubscribed. Haun Ventures, Translink Capital, and Mirana Ventures also joined the extension round, pushing the total investor list well beyond typical crypto-native venture backers into strategic corporate money from a card network and a stablecoin issuer directly.

Velocity’s platform lets payment companies and banks use stablecoins for settlement, liquidity, and treasury operations without ripping out the systems they already run. That’s a deliberate scope: the company is targeting the layer connecting issuers, card networks, acquirers, and merchants, not the wallet consumers see.

Stablecoin circulation has grown past $300 billion, with usage expanding from crypto-exchange dollar transfers into payments, cross-border transfers, and corporate treasury work, the exact seam Velocity is trying to occupy.

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The Back-End Layer Nobody Fixed

Queathem’s framing draws directly on his time at Worldpay, which settles more than $2 trillion in annual payment volume. His diagnosis: consumer payments got faster and slicker over the past decade and a half, but the machinery behind them didn’t.

“All this capital has flowed into payments over the last 15 years, and it’s been 100% focused on how do you create a better experience on the front end for consumers,” Queathem said. “But no one has fixed the back-end layer.”

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Why Ripple Participates?

Visa’s check is notable precisely because Velocity isn’t pitching stablecoins as a card replacement. The company expects blockchain-based money to sit underneath existing payment rails, absorbing more of the funding and settlement work that happens invisibly to end users.

Visa’s Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products and strategic partnerships, said stablecoins are playing an increasingly important role in reshaping how value moves across the Visa ecosystem, a statement that reads less like hedging and more like a network trying to own the migration rather than get disrupted by it.

Velocity Chief Growth Officer Matt Larson made the consumer-invisibility point explicit: it probably doesn’t lead to everyone switching to stablecoin wallets. Instead, he expects the funding and settlement flowing around card networks to increasingly shift toward stablecoin rails while the front-end experience stays unchanged.

Queathem’s longer bet is more aggressive; he expects every global business to hold some value onchain within five years, which would create sustained demand for reconciliation and treasury tools bridging blockchain assets with legacy financial systems.

That’s a projection, not a confirmed trend, and it’s worth treating it as one. But the investor list here isn’t speculative money chasing a narrative. It’s a card network and a stablecoin issuer putting capital behind the specific thesis that treasury and settlement infrastructure, not retail wallets, is where stablecoin adoption compounds first.

Ripple participation fits a broader pattern of the company pushing RLUSD and related infrastructure into institutional credit and treasury products rather than retail-facing crypto rails, reinforcing the same back-end thesis Velocity is selling to its bank and payments-company clients.

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