Kulipa Raises $6.2 Million to Build the Plumbing Behind Stablecoin Spending

💰 A Fresh Round for the Infrastructure Layer

Paris-based fintech startup Kulipa has closed a $6.2 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $9.2 million. The raise follows a $3 million pre-seed in July 2024, co-led by Fabric Ventures and White Star Capital. Kulipa founder and CEO Axel Cateland confirmed the round to The Block but declined to share details on the fundraising timeline, tranche structure, valuation, or board seat arrangements. The capital will go toward expanding the company's team of 20 to roughly 30 employees, with a focus on go-to-market and customer success roles. For investors watching the crypto payments space, this round signals continued conviction in B2B stablecoin infrastructure as a category, not just the consumer-facing wallets and apps that typically capture headlines.

🏗️ What Kulipa Actually Builds

Kulipa is not a consumer crypto card. It is an infrastructure provider that helps enterprise clients, including fintech platforms and crypto wallets, issue their own white-label stablecoin payment cards. Clients plug in via API and control the entire cardholder experience, while Kulipa handles everything running underneath: payment processing, fraud management, pre-fundings, and settlement. In Cateland's words, "The wallet just plugs in via API and controls the experience end-to-end. We're essentially closing the last mile between stablecoins and everyday spending." This model means Kulipa's customers can launch branded stablecoin cards without building the compliance and operational stack from scratch. Revenue comes from charging clients for services alongside standard interchange income, a proven model in traditional card issuing now adapted for the stablecoin era.

🚧 Why the Direct Route Is Out of Reach for Most Fintechs

Going directly to Visa or Mastercard to launch a card program sounds straightforward, but it is far from it. Obtaining principal membership in each region requires a long, expensive, and operationally complex process that is typically out of reach for most fintechs and wallet providers. Companies must meet strict financial and compliance requirements, maintain capital reserves, and navigate separate approval processes across every geography they want to serve. Kulipa removes that barrier entirely. By holding the necessary relationships and compliance infrastructure itself, the company lets clients bypass years of groundwork. This dynamic mirrors how Stripe simplified merchant payment acceptance in the early 2010s, positioning Kulipa within a broader pattern of fintech companies that profit by abstracting away complexity so others can move faster.

🤖 The AI Angle and Competitive Edge

Kulipa is not just a card issuer with an API. The company is leaning into artificial intelligence as a structural cost advantage over legacy processors. Cateland stated directly: "Our key competitive advantage is that by combining stablecoins and AI, we operate significantly more efficiently than traditional card issuers." That efficiency matters because margins in card issuing are thin, and traditional processors carry significant overhead in fraud operations, reconciliation, and compliance monitoring. Kulipa's AI-assisted approach to those functions is designed to keep operating costs lower while maintaining the reliability enterprise clients require. For the fintech and crypto wallet companies that might consider building these capabilities themselves, the case Kulipa is making is straightforward: outsourcing to a specialized, AI-native infrastructure provider is faster and cheaper than doing it in-house. That pitch is landing with investors and early clients like Privy, who are already using Kulipa to power stablecoin card programs.

📈 The Market Kulipa Is Riding

Kulipa's raise is happening against a backdrop of explosive growth in crypto card spending. Monthly volume climbed from roughly $100 million in early 2023 to over $1.5 billion by late 2025, representing 15x growth in under three years. On an annualized basis, the market now exceeds $18 billion. Visa alone commands more than 90% of on-chain card volume across 130-plus programs, and its stablecoin-linked card spend reached a $3.5 billion annualized run rate by the end of 2025. Cards remain the dominant way consumers spend stablecoins because they run on existing merchant infrastructure with no new integrations required. For infrastructure providers like Kulipa, this is the key insight: stablecoin adoption at the consumer level depends on spending feeling familiar, and familiar means cards. The companies building that invisible conversion layer are well-positioned as volume continues to compound.

🎯 What This Means for the Payments Landscape

Kulipa's seed round is a small data point in a much larger shift. The stablecoin payments stack is maturing quickly, with capital flowing not just to consumer apps but to the infrastructure layers that make those apps possible. Competitors like Rain, which raised a $250 million Series C at nearly a $2 billion valuation in January 2026, and Reap, processing over $6 billion annually, show the scale this category can reach. Kulipa is earlier and smaller, but it is targeting a specific gap: the long tail of fintech platforms and crypto wallets that want to offer cards without the complexity of building or integrating full-stack issuance themselves. For traders and investors, the broader takeaway is that the stablecoin payments infrastructure category is becoming a legitimate fintech vertical. The winners will be companies that combine compliance expertise, network access, and operational efficiency. Kulipa is making a credible case that it belongs in that conversation.

Sources

https://www.theblock.co/post/396063/stablecoin-card-kulipa-seed-round https://www.kulipa.xyz/post/reinforcing-our-vision-through-partnership-with-argent-and-3-million-pre-seed-funding https://insights4vc.substack.com/p/the-state-of-stablecoin-cards https://privy.io/blog/making-stablecoin-spendable-with-kulipa-debit-cards https://wallester.com/blog/business-insights/how-to-launch-a-white-label-payment-card-programme

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