This week, we’re tracing the infrastructure quietly being built beneath the financial system everyone else is racing to disrupt. In our headline Q&A, Tomasz Sowa, Founder & CEO of SDRB, makes the case that reserve infrastructure — not faster payments or flashier products — is the next great frontier in digital finance.
Samarth Shekhar then takes us deal by deal through four startups, Ground, Tetrix, Caplight and Equipal, each quietly removing the friction that keeps banks, allocators and lenders from scaling into new markets. Frank Schwab follows with a sobering look at why Visa and Mastercard’s combined volume has already been eclipsed by stablecoins, and what that means as machines become the next major customer base.
We close with the latest venture financing across the ecosystem — proof that the builders shaping finance’s next decade are already being backed. Let’s get into it.
A Q&A with Tomasz Sowa from SDRB on Building Reserve Infrastructure for Digital Finance
While the digital finance industry has spent the past few years racing to build faster payments, smarter stablecoins and seamless tokenization, one foundational question has gone strangely unanswered: who is actually safeguarding the reserves behind it all?
Tomasz Sowa, Founder & CEO of Strategic Digital Reserve Bank (SDRB), believes the answer lies in a category that doesn’t yet have a name in most boardrooms — ReserveFi. Rather than building another product on top of digital assets, Sowa is building the infrastructure layer underneath them: governance, independent verification and treasury architecture designed to make trust verifiable rather than assumed.
In this Q&A, he shares why he thinks reserve infrastructure — not tokenization or AI — is the next major frontier in digital finance, and why he believes capital protection will become an architectural challenge as much as a regulatory one.
1-Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
I’m the Founder & CEO of Strategic Digital Reserve Bank, where we’re building ReserveFi—a new category focused on reserve infrastructure for digital finance.
SDRB wasn’t born from the idea of creating another cryptocurrency or financial product. It started with a simple observation: while digital finance has made remarkable progress in tokenization, stablecoins, payments and on-chain financial services, one critical layer remains underdeveloped—the infrastructure governing, verifying and protecting digital reserves.
That observation became the foundation of SDRB.
Today, I’m building a multidisciplinary team that brings together expertise from financial infrastructure, treasury architecture, payments, governance, compliance and blockchain engineering. We believe that building reserve-grade infrastructure requires combining the best practices of traditional finance with the innovation of digital assets.
Our long-term vision is not simply to build a company, but to help establish ReserveFi as a new infrastructure category for digital finance—one where transparency is complemented by independent verification, governance is built on rules rather than promises, and trust is designed into the architecture itself.
We believe the next generation of digital finance will not be defined solely by faster transactions or new financial products, but by the quality of the infrastructure that protects the capital behind them.
Simply put, Strategic Digital Reserve Bank is building ReserveFi.
Read more from the interview: Pioneering ReserveFi and Trust Architecture in Digital Finance
B2B FinTech @Scale Deal Highlights: Ground, Tetrix, Caplight & Equipal.
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
Ground: Banks and insurers are sitting on billions in idle float and reserve balances that could be earning onchain yield — but getting there has required custom blockchain integrations that compliance and technology teams won’t sanction. Ground collapses that barrier into a single API that routes balances into curated onchain credit markets with configurable risk and liquidity parameters, no blockchain build required, making onchain yield a treasury policy line item rather than a technology project.
Tetrix: Pension funds, insurance general accounts, and endowments allocating to alternatives receive fund performance data 30–45 days late in inconsistent PDFs, manually re-keyed and stale before it informs any decision — leaving CIOs under-allocated to private markets not for mandate reasons but operational ones. Tetrix ingests fund reports with AI, normalises them into a single data model, and delivers real-time portfolio analytics, allowing insurance and pension allocators to scale their alternatives book without adding analyst headcount.
Caplight: Investment banks and wealth managers wanting to offer institutional and UHNW clients exposure to the $12 trillion private venture market — secondaries, pre-IPO access, derivatives on private company stock — have had no reliable continuous price signal to structure or price any of it credibly. Caplight provides that missing infrastructure: $300B+ in secondary transaction data, a proprietary real-time valuation algorithm, and derivatives and transaction rails layered on top, enabling banks to offer private market structured products without building the pricing layer themselves.
Equipal: UK mid-market SMEs purchasing equipment default to cash or specialist leasing companies because their bank has no product that meets them at the point of purchase — leaving a large, asset-backed lending opportunity unserved. Equipal embeds directly into the sales systems of 75+ equipment suppliers, handling origination, credit, and documentation digitally at the moment of sale, giving regional banks a fully outsourced origination channel that deploys forward-flow capital into asset-backed SME loans without requiring any supplier relationships of their own.
Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of 20K+, reach out to Samarth Shekhar or Frank Schwab.
The Settlement Shock: Why Visa and Mastercard are not enough for the 2030 economy.
by Frank Schwab
A look at the real numbers reveals a tectonic shift in global financial infrastructure: Stablecoins settled a gross transaction volume of $27.6 trillion last year. That exceeds the combined volume of the Visa and Mastercard networks. This is no longer a niche experiment; it is the new, hard settlement layer for institutional value.
Why is this transition happening right now? Because the largest customer base of the future doesn’t have a pulse. We are moving toward an economy where machines are no longer just tools, but increasingly act as independent economic actors. By 2030, there will be an estimated 39 billion connected IoT devices. An autonomous vehicle paying its own charging station, or an AI agent buying cloud capacity in the background, will become the standard.
Read more here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/frankschwab_machineeconomy-stablecoins-bankingarchitecture-share-7474900454171303937-ptV7/
VENTURE FINANCING
Anchorbase Raises $2M Pre-seed
Anchorbase, a payments and automation platform for mid-market businesses, today announced it has raised a $2 million USD pre-seed round backed by Cambrian VC and TTV Capital. Anchorbase uses AI to automate payment collection, reconciliation, reporting, and back-office workflows within the software that companies already use. The platform functions as a secure desktop environment that interacts with systems the way an employee does: by understanding what is on the screen, knowing what action needs to happen next, and helping complete that action accurately and repeatably. With Anchorbase, businesses can initiate payments inside their existing DMS, CRM, accounting system, or operational software, collect funds through a terminal or payment link, automatically reconcile payments to the correct invoice, and trigger the next workflow – all without switching between disconnected tools. New funding will support continued product development, deeper integrations with systems of record, expanded customer support, and go-to-market growth across North America.
Source: https://betakit.com/six-month-old-anchorbase-closes-2-million-usd-pre-seed-round/
Co-Founder of Superstate Launches Ground, Raises $3.6M to Embed Onchain Finance Everywhere
Ground, the money infrastructure company, launched out of stealth today alongside a $3.6 million pre-seed funding round. The investment was led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, with additional funding from Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, and Consonant Ventures. Until now, to access onchain yield, financial platforms have had two choices: leave user capital idle, or spend time and treasure building custom blockchain integrations. Ground is introducing modular API infrastructure that unifies fragmented onchain sources into a single integration, allowing any neobank, exchange, or fund manager to seamlessly embed onchain finance directly into their existing product suites. Ground’s API plugs directly into existing interfaces and ledgers, enabling Ground’s clients to configure yield strategies to their exact risk and liquidity requirements with simple, automatable allocation management. Co-founded by fintech and digital asset veterans from Stripe, Superstate, HiFi and Compound, Ground enables financial applications and platforms to seamlessly embed onchain asset management directly into their products.
Source: https://thedefiant.io/news/press-releases/ground-launches-onchain-finance-api-3-6m-raise
EJF Ventures backs Lama AI’s $20m lending push
[SixThirty portfolio company] Lama AI, the AI-native loan origination platform built for community and regional banks, today announced a Series A led by EJF Ventures, bringing total funding raised to over $20 million, supporting its 3x year-over-year growth. The round was led by EJF Ventures, the FinTech arm of EJF Capital. New investors Fin Capital and 1st & Main joined alongside a number of banking industry veterans, with existing backers Viola Ventures, Hetz Ventures and SixThirty all returning. The proceeds will be used to expand Lama AI’s go-to-market and customer success functions, scaling to meet rising demand from banks across the United States, while the company continues to build out AI capabilities tailored to regulated financial institutions. The platform is already live at dozens of community and regional banks, including SouthState Bank, Colony Bank, Capital Community Bank, First Bank, Gate City Bank and Luminate Bank, and has processed billions of dollars in loan volume since its launch.
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/06/24/ejf-ventures-backs-lama-ais-20m-lending-push/
GrailPay Raises $10.5M Series A to Scale Risk Decisioning Infrastructure for the Future of Instant, Agentic Payments
GrailPay, the risk and data network for B2B payments, today announced a $10.5 million Series A led by MissionOG, with participation from EJF Ventures, Counterpart Ventures, Construct Capital, Commerce Ventures, and SSC Venture Partners. The funding will accelerate expansion of GrailPay’s Payments Identity Network, the trust layer for bank account risk in the future of agentic and instant business payments. GrailPay’s risk decisioning models aggregate proprietary first-party processing data from its payments platform business with numerous leading third-party data sources, providing tailored insights into the risk profile of a bank account and the identities associated with it, the critical first step in underwriting the risk of new commerce use cases like agentic payments, stablecoin cross-border remittances, and instant, guaranteed bank payments. Its network of bank account risk profiles is one of the largest available today, and provides the foundation for widespread commercial adoption of agentic payments. “$80T. That’s the size of the B2B payments economy that will go unaddressed by the flurry of innovation we’re seeing in agentic protocols,” said Will Messina, Co-founder & CEO, GrailPay.
Tetrix raises $15M Series A to scale AI platform powering $100B in private market assets
Tetrix, the AI investment platform for alpha-seeking limited partners in alternative markets, today announced it has raised a $15 million Series A round co-led by White Star Capital and Innovation Endeavors with participation from several high-profile angel investors. The funding will accelerate product development, team expansion, and global growth as Tetrix scales to support its clients in the rapidly expanding alternative markets ecosystem. “Alternative markets are an over $20 trillion asset class running on 100 million PDFs,” said Olivier Babin, CEO and Co-Founder of Tetrix. Since launching commercially in September 2024, the company works with dozens of leading institutional investors across the globe — including endowments, foundations, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, fund of funds, and family offices — with over $100B in AUM managed on the platform. “Tetrix is already collapsing 45-day analyst workflows into a single day and saving customers thousands of manual hours per investment — that’s a category-defining step change, not an incremental productivity gain,” said Harpinder Singh, Partner at Innovation Endeavors.
Caplight Raises $16M Series A led by BlackRock and Fin Capital to power the next era of private markets
SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 — Caplight Technologies has closed a $16 million Series A led by BlackRock and Fin Capital, with strategic participation from UBS Investment Bank. The round extends its lead in venture secondary data and fuels expansion across private market data and agentic workflows for research and transactions. Caplight’s data shows VC has tripled into a $12+ trillion asset class in three years, outpacing the infrastructure built to navigate it. Caplight unifies private markets data and investing in one platform: 100,000 company and investor profiles, $4 trillion in funding round data, $300+ billion in proprietary secondary data, and $5+ billion in daily live transaction flow. Customers collectively manage over $52 trillion in assets and access Caplight via platform, API, and MCP server. “Transparency unlocks private markets for institutional investors,” said Javier Avalos, CEO of Caplight. “With private markets becoming a growing part of portfolios, investors are increasingly demanding better data, transparency, and efficient secondary market infrastructure,” said Kunal Khara, Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Aladdin Product at BlackRock.
British asset finance platform equipal secures €18.84 million to grow team and lending capacity
equipal, a FinTech funder of business equipment out of London, has secured €18.84 million (£16.25 million) in a combined investment in order to hire across business development, marketing, operations, credit and data where the team expects to grow to 12 in the next year. The funding includes a £1.25 million equity investment from Altum Capital Management alongside a headline £15 million forward flow facility. Founded by former investment banking professional Eamonn McMahon and initially soft launched in 2021, equipal is a tech-enabled funder of business equipment. The platform is integrated directly into the sales systems of more than 75 equipment suppliers across the UK, connecting point-of-sale financing for SMEs purchasing advanced manufacturing, construction, and technology equipment. equipal’s combined equity and forward-flow facility sits within a 2026 funding context in which capital has continued to move into SME-focused financial platforms, specialist lending models and embedded finance infrastructure.
Andreessen Horowitz Backs Compute Marketplace Ornn in Seed Round
Ornn raised $33 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz as the marketplace startup seeks to build a venue where the power that drives artificial intelligence can be bought and sold. a16z crypto participated in Ornn’s latest round alongside Galaxy Ventures, Nordstar and SV Angel, plus existing backers Crucible Capital, Vine Ventures, Link Ventures and Box Group. Founded by MIT graduates Kush Bavaria (CEO) and Wayne Nelms (CTO), Ornn first developed the Ornn Compute Price Index (OCPI), a benchmark built exclusively from live GPU spot transactions covering H100, H200, B200, and RTX 5090 hardware, already distributed on Bloomberg Terminal. In May 2026, the Intercontinental Exchange announced a partnership with Ornn to launch cash-settled, U.S. dollar-denominated GPU compute futures contracts referenced against the OCPI, pending regulatory approval. Ornn has also built Ornn Compute, an actual marketplace that aggregates GPU capacity from across public clouds and neoclouds into a single platform, with a secondary market for transfers and on-demand sublets. It’s a16z’s first investment in a marketplace for compute.
If there’s a single thread running through this week’s edition, it’s that the future of finance is being built in the unglamorous layers most people overlook — reserve governance, settlement rails, data infrastructure, origination workflows.
The founders and investors featured here aren’t chasing headlines; they’re building the foundations everyone else will eventually depend on. As always, thank you for reading, and we’ll see you next week with more of what’s next in finance.