Squads, a financial infrastructure company building on Solana, has raised $18 million in a strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures, bringing total funding to $42.9 million. The raise accelerates Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.
The company’s core thesis is that stablecoins have fundamentally changed the infrastructure of business finance by turning money into software, allowing treasury and payments to be separated from the fractional reserve banking system for the first time. A new category of licensed Payment Service Providers that move money across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails has emerged rapidly, evidenced by Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge and Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK.
Altitude is built on this shift. The platform does not hold customer funds. Treasury is held in stablecoins and settles instantly, 24/7, at low cost. When funds need to reach traditional banking rails, they do so through a network of licensed stablecoin Payment Service Providers, including Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, and Due. Since publicly launching in December 2025, Altitude has processed over $200 million in payments for exporters, global agencies, crypto-native companies, and cross-border remote teams.
Altitude addresses two historically limiting criticisms of stablecoin adoption in business finance. On compliance, the platform has built a proprietary engine covering continuous sanctions screening, AML checks, transaction monitoring, and KYB verification. On security, Squads Protocol handles asset custody and money movement, securing over $10 billion in value, with every transaction recorded and settled on Solana. The new capital will support team growth, payment network expansion, and accelerated product development.
KEY QUOTES:
“This raise backs a simple idea: businesses are better off running on stablecoins than on legacy banking infrastructure. Solana is now mature enough to carry global business finance, regulators have built the frameworks to support it, and for the first time you can build a full financial platform on a genuinely new system.”
Stepan Simkin, CEO, Squads
“The Squads team spent the last four years building the security infrastructure that most of the Solana ecosystem runs on. Stablecoins and programmable blockchains are changing how global finance works. This is the team with the technical depth and the vision to build the financial platform that sits on top of that shift. We believe Altitude will be how the next generation of global businesses runs their financial operations.”
Matthew Beck, Head of Solana Ventures
“As we scaled, treasury and payments turned into an operational headache. Complexity and fees kept compounding. Altitude removed both.”
Kash Dhanda, COO, Jupiter