Anna Kucera / Anna Kucera
The world of payments changes quickly, and a band of startups leads the costs to transform the way banks make business in emerging fields such as stablecoins and artificial intelligence.
Crunchbase follows more than 8,600 fintech startups and nearly 2,400 payment startups at various development stages which collectively collected around $ 257 billion and $ 96 billion respectively. The start -up space is particularly important for banks, not only for the services they provide, but also as these companies ripen, they often become acquisition objectives. Example The point is the recent acquisition of the Stablecoin Payment Payment by Bridge.
The following is a sample of five previous startups on which analysts, venture capital and other industry professionals say that banks should watch closely in 2025.
Feed the fight against fraud
Business: Darwinium
Founders: Alisdair Faulkner, Annanth Gundabatula, Ben Davey, Caleb Moore and Colin Goldie.
HQ: San Francisco, with operations in Australia and the United Kingdom
Website:
Founded year: March 2021
Use cases for banks: Darwinium is a fraud prevention platform that incorporates automated detection of fraud with traditional fraud prevention capacities. The platform offers complete visibility and control of each digital interaction with the bank, on the web, applications and APIs to separate good and bad behavior, in real time.
Funding: $ 28 million in venture capital
The biggest investors: Includes Us Venture Partners, Blackbird, Airtree, accomplice and Ravikant naval.
Customers: Several global companies in all sectors, including Neobanks, Fintechs, Markets and Gaming Companies.
Major milestones: The company recently announced its expansion in the United States, with a management team based in the United States and the relocation of its head office in San Francisco.
Growth plans: The company continues to develop US operations, CEO Alisdair Faulkner told American Banker. This year’s income will increase five times compared to 2024, he added.
Skyfire
Agenic AI attracts new entrepreneurs
Business: Skyfire
Founders: Amir Sarhangi and Craig Dewitt
HQ: San Francisco
Website:
Founded year: 2022
Use cases for banks:
Funding: $ 9.5 million in seed capital
Investors: Includes Coinbase Ventures, A16Z CSX, Neuberger Berman, Brevan Howard Digital, Intersection Growth Partners, DRW, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, Red Beard Ventures, Sfermion, Circle, FBG, Gemini, Crossbeam Venture Partners, Everyonealm, Drapers Associates, Arca and Ripple.
Customers: Mainly agent developers and agent platforms, including certain banks.
Major milestones: Launched the platform in August 2024, and there are now more than 10,000 developers who deal with agents using Skyfire.
Growth plans: The company plans to deploy an updated version of the more scalable and more flexible platform. He also plans to recruit and sign additional partnerships with financial institutions and internet infrastructure providers, Craig Dewitt, the company’s co -founder, told American Banker.
Cross
Where AI believes itself with stablecoins
Business: Cross
Founders: Rodri Fernández Touza and Alfonso Gómez-Jordana
Headquarters: New York and Miami
Website:
Use cases for banks: All-in-one platform for AI companies and agents in order to take advantage of the stablecoin and blockchain rails, including portfolios, payments and tokenization.
Based: March 2022
Funding: 24 million dollars in venture capital.
Investors: Includes Ribbit Capital, Nyca Partners, First Round, Franklin Templeton and Lightspeed Faction.
Customers: Dozens of fortune companies 500, one of the 20 largest banks by assets under management and one of the five largest payment companies, the co -founder of the company Rodri Fernández Touza told American Banker.
Major milestones: In the past year, the company has seen the subscription income increase by 1 100%, with more than 40,000 companies and developers using the Crossmint platform on more than 40 blockchains.
Growth plans: Following registration for customers, after the recent launch of a new tool kit for the agency’s trade. The company also recently launched an open source tool kit which allows users to launch fintech applications or integrate financial services in a few minutes.
Adobe Stock
Bet on the remuneration of cryptography for business
Company name: Merge money
Founder: Kebbie Sebastian
HQ: London
Website:
Founded year: 2022
Use cases for banks: An API-STHT platform which provides a stablecoin payment infrastructure for companies.
Funding: 9.5 million dollars in venture capital
Investors: Includes Coinbase and Octopus Ventures
Customers: B2B markets, fintechs, corporate treasurers, approved cryptographic companies and European banks.
Major milestones: Merge has received its electronic money establishment, or EMI, as well as licenses of virtual asset service service, or VASP, which are required by European regulators to hold customer funds in several currencies and to convert USD or euros to Stablecoin or Vice Versa. The company has expanded the coverage of local instant payments to more than 75 countries.
Growth plans: Geographic expansion, including the United States, the founder, Kebbie Sebastian, told American Banker.
Surf on the cross -border wave
Company name: Conduit
Founder: Kirill Gertman
HQ: Boston
Website:
Founded year: 2021
Use cases for banks: The platform facilitates cross-border payments in stablescoins or local currencies as an alternative to Swift. The company allows faster cross -border transactions, cheaper and more reliable for banks and their customers.
Funding: 53 million dollars in venture capital
Investors: Understand Dragonfly, Altos Ventures, Helios Digital Ventures and Portage Ventures.
Customers: Banks, fintechs, large multinational companies and others.
Major milestones: In 2024, the volume of transactions increased 16 billion dollars 16 times, CEO Kirill Gertman told American Banker told CEO. The company also recently signed an agreement with Braza Group, which has the largest Brazil exchange bank.
Growth plans: Targeting small to medium banks in the United States and elsewhere. The company also plans to integrate its platform with the main banking basic suppliers in order to make adoption more transparent for small banks.
