Augustus, a startup building a federally chartered clearing bank around stablecoins, announces a $180 million Series B round this week. The raise values the company at $1 billion.
Tiger Global leads the round, joined by Hummingbird, QED, and a group of individual backers that includes the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel.
Other notable names in the round include Circle co-founder Sean Neville, former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, and Rain co-founder Farooq Malik. Augustus has now raised $210 million total.
The company, previously known as Ivy, aims to replace legacy correspondent banking, the network of intermediaries that currently handles most cross-border dollar transfers between financial institutions.
CEO and co-founder Ferdinand Dabitz frames the mission simply. “We started Augustus with a simple thesis: the Dollar is the greatest product in the world but its distribution is fundamentally broken,” he says.
Augustus already runs regulated European entities and claims to process billions of dollars for international institutions, including crypto exchange Kraken, through its existing euro clearing operations.
The firm holds conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter, which would extend its clearing services into direct dollar access.
Rather than launching its own stablecoin, Augustus wants to build the plumbing that lets banks and fintechs move value across both traditional rails and blockchain networks.
Its platform supports operating and FBO accounts along with named virtual accounts, letting customers transact through Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoin rails from one system.
Dabitz argues that legacy clearing systems fail to keep pace with modern demand. “The existing clearing model runs on legacy correspondents that are closed 115 days a year, built for humans, and take two days to settle,” the company says.
He expects the industry to eventually catch up with this always-on approach. “We think in 10 years from now all clearing banks will offer stablecoin rails like they offer Fedwire,” Dabitz says.
The company’s core banking platform, called Marble, automates back office operations and aims to keep settlement running around the clock, seven days a week.
New funding will go toward expanding dollar clearing services and adding customers across Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa over the coming months.
The raise arrives as banks, fintechs, and crypto firms race to modernize cross-border payment infrastructure, with stablecoins increasingly treated as mainstream financial plumbing rather than a niche experiment.
