Mesh Raises $82 Million to Expand Global Crypto Payments Network

Crypto payments network Mesh raised $82 million in a Series B funding round to accelerate product development and the expansion of its application programming interfaces (APIs).

The company’s technology is already available to more than 400 million users in more than 100 countries through its partnerships with MetaMask, Shift4 and Revolut, Mesh said in a Tuesday (March 11) press release.

“With this funding, we’re expanding the first truly global crypto payments network — one that allows users to pay with any crypto they hold while ensuring merchants can settle in the stablecoin of their choice, just like they do with fiat today,” Mesh CEO and Co-founder Bam Azizi said in the release.

Mesh’s proprietary SmartFunding technology, which powers its payment solution, provides this capability by eliminating friction between users’ assets and merchants’ settlement requirements, according to the release. It does so without requiring users to manually convert their assets beforehand.

The company’s latest funding round was led by Paradigm, per the release.

“We think crypto and stablecoins will be an enormous transformation to payments,” Paradigm General Partner Charlie Noyes said in the release. “Mesh makes paying with crypto as simple as using a credit card for users and merchants while preserving the benefits of transacting over blockchain rails.”

Mesh raised $22 million in a Series A funding round in September 2023, saying it aimed to expand into new markets as it bolstered its embedded finance platform.

In January 2024, the company said that PayPal Ventures invested in it and that the funding was made almost entirely with PayPal’s in-house stablecoin, PayPal USD.

Amman Bhasin, partner at PayPal Ventures, said at the time in a press release that Mesh’s innovative technology makes it “a clear leader in this dynamic landscape.”

In its Tuesday press release, Mesh said most of the $82 million of investments in its latest funding round were settled with PayPal USD.

“PYUSD was leveraged to close funding instantly and Mesh’s technology was used to transfer the assets securely,” the release said. “The benefits of using stablecoins for VC funding are that it’s instant, cheap, transparent and available 24/7.”