The New Era for Business Banking and Payments: Investing in Dakota

By Alex Felix
July 15, 2025

with contributions from Einar Braathen & George Christopher

It’s Stablecoin Summer, and the adoption of stablecoins marks a profound shift in how value moves across the internet. Stablecoins are programmable, borderless, and instantly transferable. They represent the first real implementation of internet-native money, which is cheaper and faster than fiat moving on traditional rails and is poised to disrupt the massive global payments industry.

Thinking about it as an API for money, tokenized assets can be easily integrated with software. In 2023, there were 3.4 trillion transactions globally, which moved $1.8 quadrillion in value and generated revenue of $2.4 trillion. By 2024 the total volume of stablecoin transactions on public blockchains exceeded the combined annual volume of Visa and Mastercard at $28 trillion. Notably this activity precedes the GENIUS Act being passed by the House and signed into law, which will mark a pivotal step toward regulatory clarity, signaling bipartisan recognition that internet-native dollars are becoming foundational to the future of global payments. This is not the future — it is already happening. And yet, the financial tooling available to businesses is immature.

A key part of our payments thesis is the idea that whoever controls the transmission of money, controls the world. Today’s traditional money movement workflows rely on a patchwork of bank accounts, FX intermediaries, entity-specific compliance tools, and manual reconciliation processes. In the legacy system, accounts are internal ledgers managed by each financial institution, settlement requires reconciliation between books, and trust is established through intermediaries — banks, clearinghouses, and correspondent institutions — each adding cost and latency. This architecture made sense in an era of paper-based systems and limited connectivity. But it has reached its limits. Most businesses still route through multiple intermediaries to make a cross-border payment. A stablecoin needs none.  

While neobanks are typically constrained to a single banking partner and serve as a wrapper on top of legacy systems, in an ideal world you would begin with the assumption that crypto rails are critical components of the future financial stack. This paradigm shift offers the opportunity to reshape simple fintech interfaces from a regional focus to global coordinators. A platform like this allows businesses to orchestrate payments, manage fiat and crypto tokens seamlessly alongside one another in their treasury, and administer global entities through a single, programmable interface. For businesses operating across borders and using multiple currencies, this can unlock a significant reduction in operational cost and complexity. 

This is why we led Dakota’s $12.5 million Series A funding round, as the team is building the valuable layer that enables businesses to operate fluidly across both fiat and crypto-native rails. Led by Ryan Bozarth and Gabe G’Sell, the team has product in their DNA, with previous experience at Coinbase, Anchorage, Square, and Airbnb. Ryan has deep expertise in building secure and scalable crypto financial products. He is the former CEO of Coinbase Custody where he scaled its institutional custody platform to secure over $100B in assets and prior to that was head of product at Anchorage. Gabe G’sell is the former founder of multiple tech ventures. One venture, Deco, an IDE platform was acquired by Airbnb. Their goal is to utilize the efficiency of crypto rails, while meeting  customers where they are. One of their core beliefs is that users shouldn’t have to be infrastructure specialists. Dakota is building a modern financial stack for businesses that simplifies stablecoin payments and onchain transfers. The platform already has over 500 customers and has processed billions of dollars in transaction volume to date.   

Dakota has built for real world needs, and the team recognizes that every modern business will, eventually, need to interact with crypto rails, whether to accept stablecoins from customers in emerging markets, pay vendors instantly across borders, or manage treasury in programmable, real-time ways.

They collapse much of the old financial rails into software, building a platform that integrates blockchains, stablecoins, traditional banking rails, compliance policies, and accounting logic. As Ryan notes: customers are switching to Dakota because traditional banks are not built for today’s global economy. Crypto infrastructure upgrades the engine under the hood, because in a wallet-centric system, the ledger is shared and globally accessible. A wallet is not an account; it is a pointer to funds you can control. Record-keeping, finality, and auditability are no longer outsourced to banks—they are built into the system itself.

At the same time, Dakota’s founders are aware that adoption requires more than access, it requires abstraction. The system must be easy to use, compliant with regulation, and interoperable with traditional tools. Modernizing the transfer of value means plugging in banks into the platform as nodes and refocusing on their role as endpoints in the real world, instead of intermediaries. By orchestrating bank accounts, wallets, and third-party financial APIs like Circle, Stripe, and local payment processors, Dakota gives businesses a single place to manage funds.

The initial target customers for Dakota include cryptonative enterprises, companies hiring or selling internationally (typically found in the SaaS and marketplace verticals), global services firms and non-profits. As more and more companies participating in the global economy recognize the benefits of crypto and stablecoin based payments, we expect the target customer base to continue to expand. We believe that this increased recognition, alongside improved regulatory clarity, will be a strong tailwind for Dakota’s growth and the sector’s advancement as a whole. 

Our conviction in Dakota rests on a seasoned founding team, a product primed to revolutionize the large global payments market, and regulatory catalysts. In the past month since the successful Circle IPO, we’ve heard it called “crypto’s chatGPT moment.” Existing vertical banking startups, be it sector-specific or geography-specific banks, are often built atop traditional infrastructure and optimize around existing constraints. We believe that Dakota is different. It is not defined by a geography, a sector, or a regulatory arbitrage. It is defined by an architecture: global, programmable, and modular. In our view, this is the correct orientation. And the good news for the crypto sector at large is that as a massive amount of value moves onchain via stablecoins and other tokenized assets, we think people will look downstream for things to do with it within the crypto ecosystem. 

We’re proud to support the team in bringing onchain finance to all enterprises. 


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