Fin emerges from stealth with $17M seed round to build stablecoin infrastructure for enterprise payments

Two former Citadel engineers just stepped out of the shadows with a simple pitch: make sending millions of dollars across borders as easy as sending a text message. Fin, co-founded by Ian Krotinsky and Aashiq Dheeraj, emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $17 million in seed funding to build a stablecoin-powered payments platform aimed squarely at enterprise clients. The round was led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next also participating. What Fin actually does At its core, Fin is a global payments platform that uses stablecoin rails to settle cross-border transactions. The targets are high-value transfers, think hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, for businesses like import-export firms that currently rely on sluggish bank wires. The app lets users send funds to other Fin users, bank accounts, or crypto wallets. The company is deliberately trying to keep the experience simple, burying the blockchain plumbing beneath a clean interface so that a CFO at a logistics company doesn’t need to understand crypto jargon to move money. On the revenue side, Fin plans to make money two ways: charging transaction fees and earning interest on its stablecoin reserves...