Mural Raises $15 Million Series A After Cross-Border Payments API Processes $2.1 Billion Across 128 Countries
Oct. 23, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
Mural has raised $15 million in Series A financing, bringing its total funding to $28 million. The company provides payment infrastructure that connects traditional banking and blockchain rails while managing the financial licenses, partner bank relationships and local settlement integrations behind them. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed $2.1 billion in payments across 128 countries.
The company plans to place more engineers directly with enterprise clients to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory and banking requirements. Its platform also uses a policy and compliance engine to apply controls such as approved counterparty lists, transfer caps and additional approvals for large transactions. Mural counts Deel, Opera and Axexo among its enterprise clients. The financing comes as research cited in the verified data points to substantial stablecoin payment activity, although the available figures measure different periods and types of flows. Mural did not disclose a valuation for the round.
Mural has raised $15 million in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $28 million as it develops payment infrastructure spanning traditional banking and blockchain rails. The financing follows a $5 million seed round raised in 2022 and earlier interim financing. Mural did not disclose its valuation for the Series A.
The company’s proposition is to give enterprise platforms a way to move payments across different markets without building every underlying banking, licensing and settlement connection themselves. That task can become more complicated when a payment involves both conventional accounts and blockchain-based transfers. Mural says it manages the financial licenses, partner bank relationships and local settlement integrations that support those routes, while providing clients with an application programming interface, or API, through which software systems can access its services.
Since launching that API in 2025, Mural has processed $2.1 billion in payment volume across 128 countries, according to the company. It also reported that its payment processing volume in 2026 has grown to nearly six times the amount processed during all of 2025. Those are company-reported operating figures; the available information does not break down the volume by payment route, customer or market.
Building for enterprise payments
Mural’s current enterprise clients include global payroll platform Deel, browser developer Opera and fintech company Axexo. Their inclusion illustrates the range of businesses on its client roster, though the available information does not specify which Mural services each uses or the volume processed on their behalf.
The company was co-founded in 2022 by chief executive officer Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, both former engineers at Palantir. Its approach combines software access with operational work that can vary by jurisdiction. A payment platform serving clients in multiple countries must account for differences in banking arrangements and regulatory requirements; Mural says it handles underlying relationships and integrations rather than leaving client platforms to assemble them independently.
That operating model is particularly relevant to payroll and corporate payments, where a platform may need to restrict who can receive funds and who can authorize a transfer. Mural’s policy and compliance engine applies programmatic controls including approved counterparty lists, account transfer caps and tiered approval requirements for large transactions. In practical terms, these controls are intended to make payment rules part of the transaction workflow rather than relying solely on checks outside it.
Local requirements shape the next phase
Mural’s engineering team plans to expand its use of “forward-deployed” engineers: staff embedded directly with enterprise clients to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory and banking requirements. The plan points to a limit of a purely standardized software rollout. Even when clients connect through the same API, the banking and compliance work needed to support payments can differ from one market to another.
The available information does not specify how many engineers Mural intends to deploy, where they will be based or a timetable for the expansion. It also does not allocate the new financing among engineering, compliance or other activities. The confirmed next step is the planned expansion of client-embedded engineering support, not a disclosed launch schedule for additional markets or products.
Stablecoin activity provides context
The funding comes against a backdrop of substantial reported stablecoin payment activity. Alvarez & Marsal data put global stablecoin payment volume at approximately $400 billion in the first eight months of 2026. Separately, Chainalysis tracked $220 billion in cross-border stablecoin flows from July 2025 through June 2026. The figures cover different periods and measures, so they should not be treated as directly comparable estimates of the same activity.
Those market figures also do not establish how much of Mural’s own volume used stablecoins. What Mural has disclosed is the overall value processed through its API, its geographic reach and the growth it reports for 2026. Together with its stated plans for embedded engineering, those disclosures show a business focused not only on connecting payment rails but also on the local banking and compliance work required to use them for enterprise transactions.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network. The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.
Ripple received final approval on 26 October 2026 for Ripple National Trust Bank, giving it a federally chartered institution for fiduciary and custody activities. The charter does not authorize commercial deposits or loans, and it does not transfer issuance of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to the new bank. RLUSD issuance remains with Standard Custody & Trust Company under New York State Department of Financial Services supervision. BNY is the primary custodian of the dollar deposits and U.S. Treasury reserves backing the stablecoin. The arrangement separates a federal custody role from state-supervised issuance. It also comes as the OCC implements the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin rules and faces a lawsuit from the Independent Community Bankers of America challenging its authority to grant national trust charters to crypto firms. Ripple has separately announced an expanded partnership with BNY and Robinhood focused on institutional custody capabilities and exploring tokenized trade finance.
Stripe confirmed in October 2026 that it plans to expand its Bridge- and Visa-powered stablecoin card issuing program from 18 initial countries to more than 100 by the end of the year. The planned rollout spans Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. It follows Stripe’s February 2025 acquisition of Bridge, whose APIs connect stablecoin transfers with fiat accounts and bank payouts. Stripe has also made Open USD available to businesses in Stripe Financial Accounts alongside USDC. Its broader stablecoin infrastructure combines Bridge’s conversion tools with Stripe’s existing payment and treasury network and embedded wallets from Privy. Lead Bank supports the card program as a financial institution partner and BIN sponsor. A separate deployment by Ramp uses Bridge APIs and Privy wallets to let businesses pay vendors in stablecoins using funds from fiat bank accounts. Together, the developments show how Stripe is assembling stablecoin services for business payments, while the planned geographic expansion remains unfinished.
Project Agorá settled approximately CHF 800,000 in live, multi-currency transactions during a July 2026 testing phase. The work examined a cross-border payment model that places tokenised commercial bank deposits on a shared ledger while holding tokenised central bank reserves on jurisdictional ledgers. Five central banks participated directly in live-reserve settlement, although the project’s wider central-bank group has since expanded to eight with the Bank of Canada’s entry. The project reports an average settlement time of 80 seconds across six currencies and uses smart contracts to run anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks simultaneously. Legal analyses found that tokenisation did not change the underlying character of deposits or reserves in participating jurisdictions. The findings support further work on deposit-based wholesale settlement, but the supplied research does not establish that the approach outperforms stablecoins. The Eurosystem plans to draw on Agorá’s architecture for Projects Pontes and Appia.