Crypto payments startup Mesh raises $75M at $1B valuation

Crypto payment processing provider Mesh Connect Inc. today announced that it has closed a $75 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation.

Dragonfly Capital led the Series C deal. It was joined by Coinbase Ventures, Japanese financial services giant SBI, Paradigm, Moderne Ventures and Liberty City Ventures. Mesh has raised more than $200 million to date.

One reason accepting cryptocurrency payments can be challenging for online merchants is that different customers use different tokens. Manually adding support for each digital asset that shoppers may wish to use can be prohibitively difficult. Furthermore, it’s necessary to provide integrations with users’ digital wallets, which creates additional complexity. 

San Francisco-based Mesh promises to ease the task. It provides a payment processing platform that supports more than 100 digital assets. Shoppers pay using their preferred cryptocurrency and merchants receive payment in fiat currency or stablecoin. According to Mesh, transactions are processed instantly.

“Crypto is crowded by design, with new tokens and new protocols emerging every day,” said Mesh co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Bam Azizi. “That fragmentation creates real friction in the customer payment experience. We are focused on building the necessary infrastructure now to connect wallets, chains, and assets, allowing them to function as a unified network.”

Making a cryptocurrency payment requires users to connect their wallets to the platform through which they’re making the purchase. Often, the process involves opening a new tab and manually entering a wallet address. Mesh’s platform replaces the workflow with a standard log-in menu, which the company says provides a better user experience.

Consumers in the European Union must often complete additional steps to carry out blockchain transactions. Those steps are set forth in MiCA, a set of regulations that the bloc implemented in 2024. Mesh says that its platform can make it easier for companies to comply with the legislation.

MiCA requires users to verify that they own the wallet with which they wish to carry out a transaction. Authentication is performed by making a small deposit from the wallet to another wallet associated with the same user. Mesh provides the software building blocks necessary to implement  MiCA verification workflows, which spares developers the hassle of creating everything from scratch.

The company also promises to ease several related tasks. It provides a service that can manage crypto applications’ authentication tokens, pieces of data that are used to verify user sessions. A so-called testnet enables developers to validate newly created cryptocurrency payment features before rolling them out to users.

According to Mesh, one of the use cases that its platform supports is agentic commerce. Certain chatbots, most notably ChatGPT, enable consumers to make e-commerce purchases with natural language prompts. Mesh can process such transactions using AP2, an open-source agentic commerce protocol that Google LLC released last year.

The company will use the proceeds from its funding round to grow its presence in Latin America, Asia and Europe. Mesh also plans to make enhancements to its payment processing platform.

Image: Unsplash