Cyclops, a Miami-based fintech startup building stablecoin infrastructure for payment companies, closed a $20 million Series A round on July 15. The round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Castle Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, Lasagna Ventures, and GPT Ventures.

The pitch is straightforward: most payment providers still rely on banking rails that shut down on weekends, holidays, and after 5 PM. Cyclops sells them an all-in-one platform that bundles stablecoin settlement, pay-ins, payouts, and treasury management through APIs, so they don’t have to build any of it themselves.

The numbers behind the platform

Cyclops has already processed over $2 billion in transaction volume across its platform. It supports more than 400 digital assets, operates in over 150 countries, and holds more than 100 global licenses.

Those aren’t vanity metrics. The client roster backs them up. Shift4 Payments, which serves over 300,000 merchants, is a Cyclops customer. So is Mastercard.

The Series A follows an $8 million seed round that closed in March 2026, backed by Castle Island Ventures, F-Prime, and Shift4 Payments. That means Cyclops has raised $28 million total in roughly four months.

Circle, the issuer of USDC, putting money into a stablecoin settlement platform is about as close to a strategic endorsement as you’ll find.

The founders’ playbook

Cyclops was founded by Alex Wilson, Pat Duffy, and David Johnson. This isn’t their first rodeo in crypto infrastructure. The trio previously built The Giving Block, a platform that enabled nonprofits to accept cryptocurrency donations.

They sold The Giving Block to Shift4 Payments, which explains why Shift4 showed up as both an investor in the seed round and a customer of the platform.

Why stablecoins, why now

The timing isn’t accidental. Stablecoin market capitalization has grown by 137% since 2024, with the total now approaching $310 billion.

The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, gave US stablecoin issuers a proper federal framework to operate within. Payment companies that previously viewed stablecoins as a regulatory minefield now see them as a competitive necessity. The problem is that building crypto infrastructure from scratch is expensive, time-consuming, and requires navigating licensing requirements across dozens of jurisdictions. Cyclops’s value proposition is handling all of that so payment firms can focus on their core business.