Latitude, a payments infrastructure firm, announced it raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed Faction, and OpenFX. The capital will fund compliance, engineering, legal and sales hiring, as well as regulatory license acquisition in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
The company builds stablecoin-to-local-currency rails, allowing neobanks, payroll platforms, and marketplaces to offer users off-ramps into bank accounts and mobile wallets. The infrastructure addresses a friction point in the stablecoin ecosystem: while USDC and USDT enable near-instant cross-border settlement, users in emerging markets often lack practical means to convert these assets into local currency without middlemen or crypto wallet friction.
Latitude was cofounded by Cyril Mathew, Brian Wrightson, and Vivek Morzaria, whose backgrounds span Stripe, Uber, Coinbase, and Meta. Mathew, CEO, spent a decade leading international payments at Uber in Europe and later headed stablecoin payouts at Stripe across 100 countries.
"Those end users need ways to get in and out of stablecoins. That neobank can try to do that in 80 countries, or they can plug into Latitude," Mathew said.
During his time at Stripe, Mathew observed limited stablecoin adoption in Vietnam and across Africa. Users resisted holding crypto wallets and managing seed phrases; they wanted local currency. He concluded that stablecoins would gain utility only if recipients could easily convert them into existing bank and mobile-wallet infrastructure. Mathew pitched the concept to Wrightson and Morzaria in late 2024 and launched a seed round.
Latitude currently operates with 15 people across shared offices in New York, San Francisco, and London. The company maintains licenses across 45 jurisdictions and plans to establish direct regulatory presence in key emerging markets.
