HIFI Raises $37 Million as $7 Billion Volume Tests Its Moat

New York-based HIFI announced a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital on September 24, 2026, and said it would use the funding to pursue more regulatory licenses, hire staff and extend its stablecoin payment infrastructure into cards and capital markets.

The Block reported HIFI’s claim of more than $7 billion in annualized processing volume across 87 countries. That figure describes the value moving through its infrastructure, rather than HIFI’s revenue. The round gives the company resources to broaden its role; whether customers come to depend on that broader role is the business question behind the scale claim.

The financing backs a move beyond payments

HIFI is seeking a place in transactions that join conventional money to tokenized assets. Participating investor Antler identified Tether as another participant and quoted its principal Chris Millisits saying, “Programmable money has crossed from thesis to real infrastructure.” Antler had backed co-founders Zach Walsh and Mo Mo Afifi before HIFI had a product. The investor’s account also says businesses using HIFI have served more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals; those are users of customers’ products, not a count of HIFI’s direct customers.

The intended expansion has different demands from moving stablecoins for payouts. Card products depend on payment networks and their rules, while capital-market transactions bring collateral, custody and trading intermediaries into the workflow. More licenses could let HIFI perform additional functions directly. For now, the value of the funding lies in giving the company room to build those connections and controls, rather than establishing that every planned function is already operating at scale.

One API joins layers that remain distinct

HIFI’s platform and banking disclosures describe inflows from banks, cards and wallets; approvals, limits, identity checks and sanctions screening; and outflows through bank rails, cards, wallets and stablecoins. They also identify Cross River Bank as the provider of banking and payment services under applicable agreements. A customer can integrate with HIFI’s API while the bank retains its own role in the transaction.

The sequence matters. Money must enter from an account, card or wallet; controls determine whether and where it can move; conversion and routing connect the chosen rails; and a bank, card network or blockchain completes the relevant transfer or settlement. HIFI’s software can coordinate those steps and give a customer a consistent way to manage them. The underlying institutions still supply services that the API cannot replace, so reliability depends partly on HIFI’s integrations with them.

That division is visible in card payouts. HIFI pairs stablecoin settlement with Visa Direct, giving developers a route from digital money to eligible cards while Visa’s network supplies the card reach. If customers use the same integration for bank transfers, wallet payments and card disbursements, the combined controls and routing could become harder to replace. That is a plausible source of switching costs, though it also ties HIFI’s service to partner availability and commercial terms.

A repo trade shows HIFI’s capital-market role

In a completed June 2026 repo transaction on the Canton Network, HIFI supplied the cash leg against U.S. Treasuries provided by DRW. Marex acted as prime broker, and the trade was priced on Tradeweb through a request-for-quote process. The transaction provides a concrete example of HIFI’s role alongside established market participants.

The cash moved from fiat over real-time payment rails into USDC, then into USDCx for settlement on Canton; the path reversed at maturity. A repo is short-term financing secured by an asset, so the cash and collateral legs must meet under agreed conditions. In this trade, HIFI connected bank money to tokenized cash, while other firms supplied the securities, intermediation and price discovery. Its contribution was a specific part of the settlement path.

That part could be valuable if institutions repeatedly need cash to enter and leave tokenized markets without rebuilding the route for each venue or asset. It also shows the limit of a single-API description: HIFI did not provide the Treasury collateral or act as the prime broker. Its opportunity is to make the handoffs dependable across transactions whose participants and settlement systems differ.

Volume measures traffic, while the moat depends on repeat use

Annualized processing volume offers a measure of activity, but it does not disclose HIFI’s take rate, the fees paid to banking and network partners, or how transactions are distributed among customers. One large institutional transfer can add substantial value to throughput without producing the same economics as many smaller payouts. Customer concentration matters too: volume tied to a few programs would be more exposed to a contract change than volume spread across recurring uses.

The strategic case therefore rests on what HIFI retains as its customers add products. Shared compliance controls, routing rules and settlement connections could make an existing integration more useful for cards or tokenized assets. Maintaining those functions across regulated partners requires continuing work, and their costs affect how much of the transaction value HIFI keeps. The disclosed volume establishes a starting scale for that effort, not the margin or durability of the resulting business.

The next useful evidence will be recurring institutional settlement activity and customers adopting more than one part of the platform. Revenue retention and customer mix would show whether broader use is becoming a lasting advantage. Until those measures are available, HIFI’s completed repo transaction illustrates a role it can perform, while the economics of performing it repeatedly remain to be shown.