Stepan Simkin
New York fintech Squads, which builds products and APIs for stablecoins, has raised $18 million in a strategic round led by New York’s Solana Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $42.9 million.
The strategic round also saw participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Switzerland’s L1D, Collab+Currency, Palo Alto, Calif.’s Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and New York’s Robot Ventures.
“We’re using it to hire, to ship, and to expand the network that makes a stablecoin-native business account work in every market we serve,” Squads co-founder and CEO Stepan Simkin said on X.
Simkin believes banking is necessary but banks are not. He co-founded Squads to replace legacy banking rails with a stablecoin-native operating system enforced by deterministic code. The company believes that stablecoins are reshaping business finance as blockchain technology enables money to function like software, and separates treasury and payments from the fractional-reserve banking system.
The company built its product, Altitude, a stablecoin-native USD account that enables businesses to save, earn, and move dollars without relying on banks. Altitude is built on Solana, a global infrastructure that offers traditional finance through simple APIs.
“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,” said Simkin.
Describing Altitude as a product built for the agentic era, Simkin said agents will take over tasks such as card approvals and vendor onboarding by enforcing required policies and reconcile continuously instead of every quarter.
Altitude’s engine enables every account to plug into licensed payment service providers (PSPs) such as Bridge, MoonPay, and Infinite, and imposes continuous sanctions screening, anti-money laundering (AML) checks, and transaction monitoring.
Key Facts
- Company: Squads
- Announcement: Raised $18 million in a strategic round.
- Date: April 29, 2026
- Investors: The round was led by New York’s Solana Ventures with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Silicon Valley, Calif.’s Haun Ventures, Switzerland’s L1D, Eugene, Ore.’s Collab+Currency, Palo Alto, Calif.’s Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and New York’s Robot Ventures
- Industry: Financial Services
- Industry Context: A developer of products and APIs for the stablecoin economy.
- Founders: Stepan Simkin
- Company URL: Squads
- Company LinkedIn page: Overview