Fintech startup Squads raises $18M to build a stablecoin-powered financial OS

Fintech startup Squads is making a clear bet on where business finance is headed—and it just raised fresh capital to back it up. The company announced an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, and several other crypto-focused investors.

The new funding brings Squads’ total to $42.9 million and will accelerate the growth of Altitude, its financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.

For years, building financial tools for businesses meant working through banks. Every product depended on bank partnerships to hold funds and access payment rails. Expanding into new markets often triggered another round of regulatory work and another banking relationship. That model defined fintech for more than a decade.

Stablecoins are starting to shift that foundation. By turning money into programmable software, they separate treasury and payments from the traditional banking stack. Transactions can settle instantly, move across borders without friction, and operate around the clock.

That shift has given rise to a new class of licensed payment service providers that bridge stablecoin networks and traditional banking rails. The pace has been fast. Stripe moved to acquire Bridge in a $1.1 billion deal. Mastercard followed with its $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK. These players are filling a gap that once made it difficult to build full financial systems on blockchain infrastructure.

Altitude sits atop that emerging stack. The platform does not custody customer funds in the traditional sense. Treasury lives in stablecoins. Payments settle instantly on-chain and, when needed, connect to banking rails via a network of licensed providers.

Since its public launch in December 2025, Altitude has processed more than $200 million in payments. Its users include exporters, global agencies, crypto-native companies, and distributed teams managing cross-border operations. The appeal is straightforward: global coverage by default, support for multiple currencies, real-time settlement, and programmable financial controls.

“This raise backs a simple idea: businesses are better off running on stablecoins than on legacy banking infrastructure. Solana is now mature enough to carry global business finance, regulators have built the frameworks to support it, and for the first time you can build a full financial platform on a genuinely new system,” said Stepan Simkin, CEO of Squads.

“The Squads team spent the last four years building the security infrastructure that most of the Solana ecosystem runs on. Stablecoins and programmable blockchains are changing how global finance works. This is the team with the technical depth and the vision to build the financial platform that sits on top of that shift. We believe Altitude will be how the next generation of global businesses runs their financial operations,” said Matthew Beck, Head of Solana Ventures.

Stablecoins Go Mainstream: Squads Lands $18M to Build Global Financial OS on Solana

Stablecoins have faced two consistent concerns in business finance: compliance and security. Altitude’s approach tries to address both head-on.

On the compliance side, the platform runs continuous sanctions screening, AML checks, transaction monitoring, and KYB verification through its own system. That framework allows each account to connect with licensed providers such as Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, and Due for broader global coverage.

Security is handled across multiple layers. At the product level, businesses get granular permissions, programmable controls, and configurable multi-factor authentication. At the infrastructure level, Squads Protocol manages custody and transaction execution, securing more than $10 billion in assets across the Solana ecosystem. Every transaction ultimately settles on-chain.

“As we scaled, treasury and payments turned into an operational headache. Complexity and fees kept compounding. Altitude removed both,” said Kash Dhanda, COO of Jupiter.

Squads is not entering an empty market. The push to rebuild financial infrastructure around stablecoins is already underway, backed by large players and fresh capital. The difference here is positioning Altitude as a full operating system rather than a single tool.

That framing matters. If stablecoins become a default layer for global finance, the companies that control the operating systems built on top could shape how money moves for the next generation of businesses.