Led by Generative Ventures, with participation from Commerce Ventures and others, the funding will accelerate Walapay’s licensing, banking, and hiring as it expands API-first cross-border payments for fintechs and financial institutions, building on $2.5 billion in annualized TPV.
New York City, New York — Walapay, global payments infrastructure for account issuance, collections, FX, and payouts, today announced a $4.6 million seed round led by Generative Ventures, with participation from Commerce Ventures, Polygon, Verda Ventures, NGC Ventures, FGV Capital, AAF, Jsquare, Knollwood, Big Brain Holdings and others.
Founded by brothers Tom and Dimitri Borgers, Walapay gives enterprises, fintechs, payment service providers (PSPs), and financial institutions a single API to move money across currencies and geographies, with direct local rail integrations across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The company already processes $2.5 billion in annualized TPV, working with customers including Kast, Nuvei, and Bastion.
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“Payments infrastructure breaks down at the last mile, where money has to land in a local account, in a local currency, through a local bank. Walapay is a rare team building that full stack themselves, owning the licensing and banking relationships instead of renting them, and using whichever rails move money fastest and cheapest. We’re thrilled to back Tom, Dimitri, and the team as they bring more of global payment volume onto rails built for how money can move on modern rails,” said Lex Sokolin, Managing Partner at Generative Ventures.
“We’re always looking for teams tackling structural gaps in underserved parts of financial services, and cross-border payments is exactly that; still slow, expensive, and stitched together with rented licenses in most emerging markets,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, Partner at Commerce Ventures. “Walapay is one of the rare platforms we’ve seen with real local rail coverage across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and we’ve watched their customers get measurable speed and cost improvements from putting volume through it.”
The gap Walapay is built to close is structural. Most global payment platforms stop at the correspondent bank; they never touch the last mile, where money actually has to land in a local account, in local currency, through a local bank. That gap gets filled with third-party licenses, aggregator partners, and margin extracted in the middle, which adds up to slower settlement, less control, and compliance risk that businesses don’t fully own. In practice, a single cross-border payment today often passes through four or five separate banks and payment service providers before it settles, each one adding its own fees, delays, and points of failure. Walapay is built to collapse that chain into one platform it owns end to end, cutting the handoffs that make cross-border payments slower and less reliable as a business expands into new markets.
“Walapay is the kind of company we started Verda to fund: infrastructure solving a real cross-border payments problem for businesses. By owning more of the stack, they can bring markets together without the fragmented technology and compliance complexity that has historically made global expansion difficult,” said Alex Witt, Founding General Partner at Verda Ventures.
“We believe next-generation payment rails will become first-class financial infrastructure, but the banking system isn’t going away anytime soon,” said Tom Borgers, Co-Founder and CEO of Walapay. “It’s important for us to bring both sides together seamlessly, so businesses can move money globally without having to think about the rails underneath.”
Walapay’s platform gives fintechs and PSPs instant settlement into multicurrency accounts, real-time repatriation of funds to emerging markets, and the option to convert idle deposits into yield-generating digital dollar instruments, with yield shared back to the customer. The company works with banking and digital asset infrastructure partners to support flexible custody models tailored to a customer’s regulatory and operational needs.
“We’ve worked closely with Tom, Dimitri, and the Walapay team for several years and have been consistently impressed by both the speed and quality of their execution,” said Marcos Fernandez, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at FGV Capital. “Cross-border payments are incredibly complex, and Walapay has done the hard work of building the banking relationships, licensing, compliance infrastructure, and partner network needed to make payments work at scale. We’re proud to be investors and partners in the company and excited to support the team as they expand into new markets.”
Walapay will use the new funding to expand its licensing footprint, deepen banking partnerships, and grow its team as it works toward bringing more banks and financial institutions directly onto modern payment rails. The company believes this shift will ultimately collapse layers of intermediation in a global cross-border payments market worth an estimated $190 trillion annually.
Walapay is also built for a new category of demand it expects to grow alongside its existing customer base: AI-native commerce. As autonomous agents and AI-driven applications increasingly need to transact and move money on their own, they require the same instant, compliant, globally connected rails that fintechs and PSPs rely on today. Rather than building a narrow, agent-specific payments product, Walapay treats AI-driven money movement as another market its infrastructure is already built to serve.
About Walapay
Walapay is global payments infrastructure built from the rails up. Through one integration, fintechs, PSPs, and financial institutions can issue multi-currency accounts, collect funds, convert currencies, and pay out globally. Walapay goes deeper into the banking, regulatory, liquidity, and local payment infrastructure behind the markets it serves, helping customers achieve global reach with stronger local execution and fewer infrastructure dependencies. Walapay is processing $2.5 billion in annualized TPV and operates in 180+ countries, supporting 60+ currencies. Learn more at walapay.io.