Four former leaders of Israeli fintech unicorn Rapyd have emerged from stealth with Cordant, a startup building a monitoring and coordination layer for financial institutions struggling to understand increasingly complex payment flows.
The company announced Tuesday an $8 million Seed round co-led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, with participation from Bankless VC, FJ Labs, SignalFire, Quona, Next Stage, Selah Ventures, Flatironx, Nascent Ventures, Silvercircle Ventures and Generative Ventures. Digital asset companies Bitso and Paxos also joined as investors and design partners.
Cordant is targeting a problem that has grown alongside the expansion of modern financial infrastructure: while money can move instantly across global payment networks, understanding exactly where a transaction went, which systems handled it and where a failure occurred remains surprisingly difficult.
“When a transaction gets stuck, it is still difficult to understand what happened and at what stage,” said Eric Rosenthal, Cordant’s CEO and co-founder. “The responsible teams were required to collect information from different systems and partners to put together the full picture.”
Rosenthal, along with co-founders Lior Levitt, Juan Jose Huezo and Sagi Ittah, encountered the problem while helping scale Rapyd’s infrastructure across more than 50 countries and more than 100 partner integrations as the company grew beyond $1 billion in revenue.
Their challenge was coordinating between banks, payment processors, compliance systems, customer platforms and local partners, each of which held only part of the information.
“The system we needed did not exist,” Rosenthal said.
Cordant is developing what it describes as a command center for payments companies, fintech firms and banks operating across fragmented systems.
The platform collects information from payment rails, bank accounts, ledgers, compliance systems and risk management tools, then organizes the data into a shared timeline showing what happened during each transaction.
The company says it does not replace existing banking systems, require institutions to centralize their data or move funds. Instead, it provides a visibility layer that allows operations, compliance, risk, treasury and audit teams to work from the same information.
The need for such a layer is growing as financial institutions adopt new technologies, including real-time payments, stablecoins, digital assets and artificial intelligence.
“Everyone wants to put AI into payments and back-office workflows,” Rosenthal said. “But institutions cannot automate responsibly if they cannot see or explain it. Context has to come before automation.”
The company is already developing the platform with 11 design partners across banking, payments, embedded finance, cross-border transactions, stablecoins and digital assets.
Among them are Bitso, a Latin American digital asset and cross-border payments company, and Paxos, which provides regulated blockchain and stablecoin infrastructure.
“Money is ultimately information, and when a transaction crosses multiple systems, the information becomes fragmented and no one party has the full picture,” said Adi Levanon, founder and managing partner at Selah Ventures, an investor in the company.
