Stripe and Uber alumni raise $35 million to make stablecoins feel like local cash

• Latitude closed a $35 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total funding to $43 million.
• Coinbase Ventures, NEA, and Lightspeed Faction joined the round.
• The Texas-based startup converts stablecoins into local payout rails so recipients never have to handle crypto directly.

Latitude, a payments startup founded by alumni of Stripe and Uber, raised a $35 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, lifting its total funding to $43 million. Coinbase Ventures, NEA, and Lightspeed Faction joined the round alongside law firm Wilson Sonsini, whose participation signals the kind of institutional-grade backing the company is positioning itself around.

The problem Latitude is built around is a familiar one in cross-border payments: stablecoins move value across borders quickly and cheaply, but the person on the receiving end usually still needs local currency in a local bank account or mobile wallet, not a crypto balance they have to figure out how to cash out themselves. Latitude’s product sits in between, taking in stablecoin payments and converting them into whatever local rail a recipient actually uses, without requiring that person to touch a crypto wallet at all.

That positioning is what’s drawing the specific mix of investors here. Coinbase Ventures brings crypto-native distribution, while Oak HC/FT and NEA are traditional fintech investors more focused on whether the underlying payments infrastructure actually works at scale, not on it being crypto at all. A stablecoin payments company built to be invisible to its end users, rather than one asking recipients to adopt crypto directly, is a specific bet: that stablecoins win as invisible settlement rails under existing financial habits, not as a product people are expected to change their behavior to use.

This post first appeared in Stripe and Uber alumni raise $35 million to make stablecoins feel like local cash