Yellow Card Raises $40M to Push Stablecoin Rails Into Banks, Passes $120M Total Raised
Nigerian-founded Yellow Card raised $40 million in strategic funding from SC Ventures (Standard Chartered), Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, and Blockchain Capital to expand its licensed stablecoin payments infrastructure, pushing its total equity raised past $120 million.
Yellow Card, a licensed stablecoin payments infrastructure provider, has raised $40 million in strategic funding to expand the rails connecting banks and businesses to stablecoin settlement across more than 50 local currencies.
The round drew participation from SC Ventures — Standard Chartered's venture investment arm — alongside Sony Innovation Fund, Polychain Capital, Blockchain Capital, and additional undisclosed strategic investors. The new capital brings Yellow Card's total equity raised to more than $120 million.
Founded by CEO Chris Maurice, Yellow Card will use the funding to scale its Global USD Accounts product — an end-to-end dollar account built for businesses — and extend its stablecoin infrastructure into Latin America and Asia-Pacific, on top of its existing African footprint.
"Money should move at the speed and convenience of the internet, and increasingly, banks want to move with it," Maurice said.
SC Ventures CEO Alex Manson framed the bet as an infrastructure play rather than a speculative one: "Stablecoins are here to stay, but adoption depends on robust infrastructure and real utility." Sony Ventures' Austin Noronha added: "Yellow Card is making stablecoin payments practical for banks, fintechs, and enterprises."
A systemically important global bank's own venture arm writing a check into stablecoin infrastructure is a different kind of validation than a crypto-native fund doing the same thing — Standard Chartered doesn't need Yellow Card to believe in crypto, it needs Yellow Card's rails to move money at scale without breaking compliance. That's the real thesis here: "licensed" is doing more work in this story than "stablecoin," since the moat isn't the technology, it's the regulatory permissioning that lets a bank touch it at all. For investors watching African fintech infrastructure specifically, Yellow Card crossing $120M raised without chasing a headline unicorn valuation is also worth noting — the company is optimizing for being plumbing banks route through, not for a markup story, and that's a different risk profile than most stablecoin plays getting attention right now.
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