Stablecoin payment card startup Rain reels in $250M – News

Financial technology startup Rain today announced that it has raised $250 million in funding from a consortium led by ICONIQ.

The round, the company’s third in a year, values it at $1.95 billion. Rain says that the cash infusion follows 12 months in which its annualized payment volume jumped by a factor of 30. The company now processes about $3 billion worth of transactions per year for more than 200 customers.

Rain, officially Signify Holdings Inc., provides a platform that enables companies to issue payment cards to their customers. The cards support stablecoins, digital assets pegged to a fiat currency. Rain says that stablecoin transactions carried out with its platform are processed in seconds instead of the up to several days required for fiat payments.

Companies can extend their Rain cards’ core feature set in various ways, including by creating a rewards program. An online banking startup, for example, could offer discounts on merchandise that account holders purchase from certain retailers.

Rain’s rewards tool is powered by technology from a startup called Uptop that it purchased in November. The latter company developed a platform that enables sports teams to offer branded cards and rewards such as complementary tickets. In addition, Uptop can measure how rewards contribute to a company’s revenue. 

Enterprises generate revenue from the Rain-powered cards they issue in the form of interchange fees. Those are commissions paid by the bank of a merchant from whom end-users purchase goods. Furthermore, Rain says that companies can use its platform to issue corporate credit cards to their employees.

A few weeks after it bought Uptop, the software maker acquired another cryptocurrency startup called Fern. The deal bought it a platform that enables users to transfer cryptocurrency to overseas recipients via more than 10 blockchains. Fern’s software also supports a number of adjacent use cases, including digital wallet creation and regulatory compliance monitoring.

Usually, equipping an application with the ability to process cryptocurrency payments requires developers to integrate with it several third-party financial systems. Fern provides its features through a single application programming interface, which speeds up the implementation workflow. Rain says that developers can deploy Fern-powered software to production in under a week.

The company will use its new funding to make additional acquisitions. According to Rain, the goal is to enhance its platform’s core stablecoin features and launch new financial products. The company also plans to secure regional regulatory licenses that will enable it to offer its services in more markets.

Image: Rain