Walapay raises $4.6 million to enable local businesses to make near-instant global payments

Walapay Inc., a global payments infrastructure company that uses stablecoins for account issuance and payouts, today announced that it has raised $4.6 million in a seed round led by Generative Ventures to offer global payments to local businesses.

Commerce Ventures, Rally Cap VC, Polygon, Verda Ventures, NGC Ventures, FGV Capital, Digital Finance Group, Knollwood and Big Brain Holdings also participated in the round.

Founded by brothers Tom and Dimitri Borgers, Walapay uses blockchain technology and a single application programming interface to move money across currencies and regions. It offers direct integrations in regions such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia, helping businesses quickly settle accounts, receive collections, and make payouts.

“We believe next-generation payment rails will become a world-class financial infrastructure, but the banking system is not going away anytime soon,” said co-founder and CEO Tom Borgers.

According to the company, most global payment platforms only focus on the correspondent bank and never reach the last mile where the money ends up in a local account via a local bank in local currency. Walapay seeks to bridge this gap, which is usually filled by a third-party payment processor, licenses, numerous aggregators and other systems that charge fees and delay settlement and cross-border money movement.

According to Walapay, a single cross-border payment can now go through four or five different banks and payment service providers before being processed. Each comes with its own fees, delays, and potential sources of error.

The Company’s platform provides financial technology companies and payment service providers with instant settlement of multi-currency accounts and real-time actions in emerging markets. These include cryptocurrency markets such as stablecoins and the ability to convert idle cash into yield-producing accounts.

A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged or “pegged” to another asset, such as the U.S. dollar, to prevent the wild price swings common to other digital currency tokens. Walapay allows companies to issue their own stablecoins to exchange for a variety of other cryptocurrencies and other regional currencies.

To achieve this, Walapay works with banking and digital asset infrastructure partners to provide flexible custody support to customers who want to hold or have their own digital currency managed. This may depend on regional regulatory requirements or company operational requirements; Not all companies want or can work directly with cryptocurrencies or stablecoins.

The company said the new funding will allow it to expand its licensing footprint and deepen banking partnerships. As interest in fast cross-border payment processing increases, the company will also expand its team to help more financial institutions and customers transition to modern payment systems.

Walapay added that it is also building a new demand category around native artificial intelligence trading. As autonomous agents increasingly conduct financial transactions and move money themselves, they will require the same instant, compliant mechanisms that fintechs and payment processors use today.

The company said that rather than developing a new, agent-specific payments product, it intends to treat AI-driven money as another market for which its infrastructure is already built. In this way, when autonomous actors expand in the financial market landscape, they do not enter the market as second-class citizens, but have access to the same instruments.

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