Yellow Card Adds $40 Million as Stablecoin Payments Push Past Africa
SC Ventures and Sony Innovation Fund joined a strategic round that takes the Atlanta company past $120 million in equity, with Latin America and Asia-Pacific next.
ATLANTA — Yellow Card, which builds stablecoin and local-currency payment infrastructure for emerging markets, announced a $40 million strategic equity round on Aug. 5, bringing its total equity financing to more than $120 million since its founding in 2016.
The round drew a mix of corporate and crypto-native capital: SC Ventures, the innovation arm of Standard Chartered; Sony Innovation Fund; Polychain Capital; and Blockchain Capital. The presence of a global bank’s venture unit alongside two digital-asset funds is characteristic of where this category now sits — no longer purely a crypto trade, not yet a conventional payments one.
The company said it would use the capital to scale Global USD Accounts, its product for businesses that need to hold and settle in dollars, to extend its stablecoin and local payment rails, and to deepen operations in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
That geographic expansion is the strategically significant part. Yellow Card built its business across African markets, where the problem it solves is acute and well understood: a company earning revenue in a volatile local currency, facing scarce dollar liquidity and slow correspondent banking, has a concrete reason to hold a dollar-denominated stablecoin. Latin America presents a recognizable version of that problem. Much of Asia-Pacific does not, and competition there is considerably denser.
The Global USD Accounts product also places the company in a more scrutinized position than pure payment processing does. Holding dollar balances for business customers invites the questions regulators ask of anything resembling deposit-taking — where the backing assets sit, who bears the risk if a stablecoin issuer breaks its peg, and which jurisdiction supervises the arrangement.
Yellow Card has generally competed on licensing as much as on technology, pursuing registrations across the markets it serves rather than operating in regulatory gaps. That approach is slower and more expensive than the alternative, and it is the main reason a company in this sector attracts investment from a bank-affiliated fund.
Neither the company nor its investors disclosed a valuation for the round, and Yellow Card has not published transaction volumes or revenue. Without those figures, the $120 million cumulative equity total is the clearest available measure of the business, and it is a measure of investment rather than of performance.