Stablecoins now settle over $300 billion worth of transactions every single day. Yet if you hold USDC or USDT in a crypto wallet, actually spending that money at a grocery store or an ATM is still surprisingly complicated. A Paris-based startup called Kulipa thinks it has the fix.
Kulipa announced a $6.2 million seed round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx, with participation from White Star Capital and Fabric Ventures.
The raise brings the company’s total funding to $9.2 million. The pitch is straightforward: Kulipa builds the plumbing that lets fintech companies issue Visa or Mastercard-branded payment cards funded directly from stablecoin balances, so users can tap their crypto wallet at checkout the same way they’d use a regular bank card.
The Problem Kulipa Is Solving
The gap between onchain settlement and real-world payments has always been wide. Most existing solutions are clunky — they rely on prefunded structures where companies lock up large amounts of collateral in advance to cover potential card spending. That’s expensive, capital-intensive, and hard to scale across multiple geographies.
Kulipa’s approach is different. Rather than relying on prefunded reserves, the platform verifies balances and triggers settlement directly on the blockchain, reducing the need for that heavy collateral upfront.
Cards issued through Kulipa work anywhere major card networks are accepted, including ATM withdrawals. The company also takes on fraud liability itself, which removes a significant operational headache for its fintech partners.
“Card issuance is the bridge between onchain balances and real-world payments,” said Axel Cateland, Kulipa’s founder and CEO. “We built Kulipa to give regulated fintech platforms the compliant, capital-efficient infrastructure they need to operate at global scale.”
Who’s Already Using It
Since launching in February 2025, Kulipa has issued more than 120,000 cards and signed 20 customers — including Flutterwave, the African payments giant, and Solflare, a Solana-based wallet. Transaction volume has grown 70% month-over-month.
The Flutterwave partnership is notable. The company processes billions of dollars in payments across Africa and is a bellwether for fintech adoption in emerging markets. Its CEO, Olugbenga Agboola, said that integrating Kulipa allows the company to turn stablecoin balances “into real-world spending” in a compliant, scalable way — which is exactly what much of sub-Saharan Africa needs as dollar-denominated stablecoins increasingly serve as a hedge against local currency volatility.
Ready, a crypto-native banking alternative, has leaned in even further. Its CEO Itamar Lesuisse said Kulipa has enabled Ready to become “an onchain alternative to banks” — a significant claim for a sector that has long promised but rarely delivered on that vision.
A Team That Knows Payments
Kulipa isn’t a crypto-native team learning payments from scratch. Cateland previously led global Apple Pay and Google Pay deployments at Mastercard. Co-founder and CTO Michael Shynar spent nearly a decade as a staff engineer at Google and built commerce infrastructure at WhatsApp. Head of Compliance Benoit Roger comes from Binance and Nickel Bank, a French neobank acquired by BNP Paribas. Head of GTM Josephine Soublin previously led Klarna’s launch in France.
That pedigree matters in a space where regulatory compliance can make or break a product. Kulipa currently holds regulated issuing coverage in the European Union, Argentina, and Nigeria, with U.S. expansion underway through a BIN sponsorship arrangement. It’s a deliberately local-first approach — getting the licensing right in each region before scaling, rather than operating in legal grey areas.
What Comes Next
The broader context here is hard to ignore. Stablecoin regulation is advancing rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic, with the U.S. Senate advancing a stablecoin bill and the EU’s MiCA framework now in effect. As the regulatory picture clarifies, the window for infrastructure companies like Kulipa is opening up.
Ameya Upadhyay of Flourish Ventures put it plainly: the missing piece in the stablecoin ecosystem has been “compliant, scalable card issuance.” 1kx founding partner Christopher Heymann framed the stakes in even broader terms, calling Kulipa’s payments layer “critical infrastructure for the next phase of crypto adoption.”
For now, Kulipa is focused on expanding its regulated footprint and growing transaction volume. The question isn’t whether stablecoins will eventually be used for everyday spending — that trajectory seems increasingly inevitable. The question is who will own the infrastructure when they are.
