HIFI raises $37 million as $7 billion processing volume tests its business model

New York-based payment infrastructure developer HIFI has raised $37 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital. The investment, announced on 24 September 2026, arrives as the company claims its platform is handling $7 billion in annualised processing volume across 87 countries.

HIFI intends to use the fresh capital to secure more of its own regulatory licences, hire staff, and push beyond stablecoin payouts into card issuing and capital markets. It is a significant step for a startup that early-stage investor Antler backed before co-founders Zach Walsh and Mo Mo Afifi even had a working product. Today, HIFI says the businesses using its infrastructure serve more than 10,000 merchants and 200,000 individual users.

But processing volume is not revenue, and HIFI’s expansion will test whether its single-API model can build a defensible business.

How HIFI's infrastructure works

Currently, HIFI acts as an orchestration layer. It coordinates inflows from cards, banks, and digital wallets, runs compliance checks, and routes payouts. To do this, it relies heavily on partner institutions. Cross River Bank provides the underlying banking and payment services under their current agreements. Even when developers integrate HIFI’s API, the bank still handles the regulated transaction.

This partnership model is visible in HIFI's card payout system, which plugs stablecoin settlement into Visa Direct to send digital funds to eligible debit cards. The advantage is convenience: if a client uses HIFI to manage bank transfers, card payments, and crypto routing simultaneously, the switching costs become high. The risk is that HIFI remains tied to the commercial terms and uptime of its partners.

Bridging capital markets

To prove it can handle more complex institutional work, HIFI recently helped orchestrate a short-term financing deal. In June 2026, the company facilitated the cash leg of a repurchase agreement (repo) trade on the Canton Network. HIFI routed fiat currency into USDC, converted it to USDCx for settlement on the blockchain, and reversed the path when the trade matured.

The rest of the transaction relied on traditional heavyweights: trading firm DRW provided the US Treasury collateral, Marex acted as the prime broker, and the trade was priced using Tradeweb's request-for-quote system. HIFI did not supply the collateral or broker the trade; it simply built the bridge between the bank accounts and the tokenised ledger.

If institutional players regularly need to move cash in and out of tokenised markets, HIFI’s bridge could become highly valuable. However, a $7 billion headline volume figure says little about HIFI’s actual margins, its take-rate, or how dependent it is on a few large customers. A single massive institutional transaction can inflate processing figures without generating the recurring retail fees that sustain a business.

HIFI’s next challenge is to show that clients will adopt multiple parts of its platform, turning a useful payment utility into a permanent fixture of their financial stack.