Squads Raises $18M to Build Altitude, a Financial OS on Stablecoin Rails
Squads has closed an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures. Total funding now stands at $42.9 million. The capital is directed at Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.
The underlying thesis is structural, not speculative. For most of the last decade, building financial products for businesses meant building on top of banks — partnerships required to hold customer funds, access payment rails, and clear compliance in every new market. Blockchains changed the underlying layer. Stablecoins turned money into software, separating treasury and payments from the fractional reserve system for the first time. That separation created a new category of licensed Payment Service Providers capable of moving funds across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails simultaneously.
The market validated the model quickly. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. These PSPs were the missing piece for a full-stack financial operations platform that doesn’t route through legacy banking infrastructure at every step.
Altitude is built directly on that shift. It does not hold customer funds. Treasury sits in stablecoins. When funds move, they settle on stablecoin rails — instantly, around the clock, at low cost. When they need to reach traditional banking systems, they do so through a network of licensed PSPs including Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, and Due. Since its public launch in December 2025, Altitude has processed over $200 million in payments for exporters, global agencies, crypto-native companies, and cross-border remote teams.
Two objections have historically limited stablecoin adoption in mainstream business finance: compliance exposure and security risk. Altitude addresses both at the architecture level. On compliance, it runs a proprietary engine covering continuous sanctions screening, AML checks, transaction monitoring, and KYB verification — the standard toolkit expected from any regulated fintech. On security, controls operate at every layer: programmable permissions and multifactor authentication at the product layer, Squads Protocol handling asset custody and money movement at the infrastructure layer (currently securing over $10 billion in value), and Solana as the settlement layer for every transaction.
The Squads team spent four years building the security infrastructure that underlies much of the Solana ecosystem. That track record is what makes Altitude more than a payments wrapper — it’s a custody-grade financial operating system that happens to run on programmable money. The regulatory frameworks are now in place. The PSP network is mature. The infrastructure is battle-tested. What’s being built on top of it is a full financial platform for the next generation of global businesses that have no particular reason to route their operations through legacy banking rails.
The new capital goes toward team growth, payment network expansion, and accelerated product development.