Former Coinbase Square Employees Raise $58M Bridge

• Bridge, a platform built by former Coinbase and Square employees, has emerged from stealth with $58M in funding from Sequoia, Ribbit, Index and Haun Ventures.
• Bridge is building a stablecoin-powered money transfer platform offering services like payouts, cross-border payments and foreign exchange.
• It also allows developers to convert the dollars into a stablecoin that they can customize and benefit from.

Bridge, a “stablecoin Orchestration and Issuance as a service” platform built by former Coinbase and Square employees has emerged from stealth with $58 million in funding. 

The stablecoin-powered money movement platform boasts backing from some of the leading Web3 venture capital firms including Sequoia, Ribbit, Index and Haun Ventures.

“We’ve long believed that stablecoins present the solution. Much of our team worked at Coinbase and led the development, launch and rollout of USDC, which was the first scaled, regulated, dollar-backed stablecoin in the US. We’ve since seen stablecoins scale to billions in payment volume across hundreds of countries,” Bridge wrote in a post on the X platform.

https://t.co/r9Wblc7UEk

— Bridge (@StableCoin) August 29, 2024

According to their social profiles, Co-founders Zack Abrams – formerly of Coinbase and Sean Yu – formerly of Square started building Bridge in April 2022. Abrams was head of product at Coinbase, while Yu was a software engineer at Square. They both held positions in other organizations before launching Bridge.

“Our Orchestration and Issuance APIs make it possible for any company and team to offer digital dollar-based services to their end consumers or businesses.”

The company has already collaborated with some of the leading organizations across the world to introduce various use cases of its platform.

To launch Payouts, it worked with the US government, aid organizations and creator platforms to disburse payments via stablecoins. 

The company has also partnered with LATAM-based crypto exchange platform Bitso to enable stablecoin-powered cross-border payments in the region. 

“Businesses with MXN can pay vendors in USD (and vice versa) with funds moved through Bridge’s stablecoin payment rails. Transactions settle in minutes and at a fraction of the cost vs. SWIFT,” Bridge wrote.

Bridge’s foreign exchange (FX) feature enables global companies to repatriate funds, allowing them to sell goods and services in LATAM and Africa, and moving the money back to the US via stablecoins.

Bridge says its platform can address some of the world’s biggest challenges related to money movement, including enabling unbanked users to easily pay for foreign services like Netflix that require the use of a credit card and reducing the costs associated with cross-border payments, which are often high when traditional payment rails are used.