(Jan 27): Mesh Connect Inc secured a US$1 billion valuation after a recent US$75 million funding round.
Five-year-old Mesh pitches itself as a network connecting crypto exchanges, wallets and financial services platforms. It’s most recent round was led by Dragonfly Capital with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Paradigm, Moderne Ventures and Liberty City Ventures.
“We strongly believe that the future of the economy is tokenised, and this tokenised economy will be heavily fragmented,” Bam Azizi, chief executive officer and co-founder of Mesh, said, adding that businesses and consumers “need something like Mesh that abstracts all of that complexity”.
Similarly to how Plaid Inc helps fintechs connect to consumers’ bank accounts, Mesh aims to plug platforms into to consumers’ crypto wallets. PayPal Holdings Inc, for example, uses Mesh to help merchants accept crypto payments from wallets including Coinbase, OKX, Phantom and MetaMask. Mesh also automatically converts those payments from crypto into fiat or PayPal’s PYUSD to pay out merchants.
Mesh sees almost US$10 billion in monthly volume across its platform, Rob Hadick, general partner at Dragonfly, said. In addition to PayPal, it counts prediction markets platform Kalshi Inc and digital bank Revolut Ltd among its clients.
“Around a year ago, there were a lot of sign-ups happening, but we hadn’t necessarily seen the flow and the amount of volume scale,” Hadick said of the decision to invest in Mesh now after years of familiarity with the startup. “We looked at the volume this year, and it had accelerated tremendously.”
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The acceleration in crypto payments volume follows the passage of the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, the so-called Genius Act, in July, Hadick noted.
“Genius has influenced the way businesses are willing to build their products,” Hadick said. “When they are building better, digitally-native, easy-to-use products then consumers adopt them.”
Mesh plans to use the new funds to accelerate its expansion into new regions including Latin America, Asia and Europe, with a particular focus on winning local fintechs and payment platforms as clients.
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