Cyclops Raises $8M for B2B Stablecoin Payments
Cyclops, a startup founded by former payments executives, has raised $8M to build a platform bridging stablecoins with traditional B2B payment networks. The funding highlights growing investor conviction in stablecoins as a high-growth sector for enterprise payments and treasury management.
The founding team of Cyclops, Pat Duffy, Alex Wilson, and David Johnson, previously built and sold The Giving Block, a crypto donation platform, to payment giant Shift4. Their experience at Shift4 building out crypto and stablecoin products revealed the significant challenge for payment service providers (PSPs): integrating digital asset capabilities required a complex and costly patchwork of multiple vendors. Cyclops aims to solve this by offering a single, integrated platform with low-code and no-code tools for PSPs. This allows these providers to offer merchants services like crypto acceptance and stablecoin settlements without needing to build their own blockchain infrastructure from the ground up. The $8M funding round was led by Castle Island Ventures and F-Prime, with strategic participation from their former company, Shift4 Payments. The move targets a significant market friction. Large corporations often face delays and operational limitations due to traditional banking hours. For corporate treasuries, this can mean trapped working capital and slow cross-border settlements that can take 2-5 business days. Stablecoins offer a solution with near-instant, 24/7 settlement capabilities. The B2B cross-border payments market was estimated at $31.7 trillion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $47.8 trillion by 2032. While stablecoin B2B payments are a small fraction of this, their use is expanding for use cases like supplier payments, cross-border liquidity management, and reducing settlement times from days to minutes. This push for adoption is supported by increasing regulatory clarity. Frameworks like the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation in Europe and the GENIUS Act in the U.S. are establishing rules for issuers and creating a more secure environment for institutions to engage with stablecoins. Cyclops is already providing its underlying stablecoin infrastructure to clients of its investor, Shift4. Notable end-users of this technology include the helicopter ride service Blade and Jeff Bezos's space exploration company, Blue Origin, for settling payments. With a team of 20, Cyclops generates revenue from transaction fees and plans to expand its partnerships to major payment processors like Fiserv and Adyen, and networks such as Visa and Mastercard.
