Augustus Raises $180M Series B at $1B Valuation for Stablecoin Bank

Decrypt Agent Tue, July 21, 2026 at 11:13 AM PDT 2 min read

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Augustus, a startup building a federally chartered clearing bank designed around stablecoins and programmable money, announced Tuesday that it raised $180 million in a Series B round, valuing the company at $1 billion.

The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel. A roster of fintech and crypto figures also backed the deal, including Circle co-founder Sean Neville, former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan, and Rain's Farooq Malik. Augustus said it has raised $210 million to date.

The company is targeting correspondent banking—the plumbing that enables money movement between institutions across borders. Rather than issuing its own stablecoin, Augustus is building infrastructure that allows banks and fintechs to transact across both traditional rails and blockchain networks.

Its API-first platform supports operating and FBO accounts and settles via Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoins. It runs on a proprietary core banking system called Marble, which the firm says enables faster settlement and 24/7 availability by deploying AI across the back office.

Stablecoins are central to why the deal matters to financial markets. Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, allowing market participants to enter and exit trades without needing direct access to dollars.

Dollar-pegged stablecoins have grown into a multibillion-dollar settlement layer, extending the reach of the U.S. dollar and putting pressure on the slow, weekday-bound correspondent system that still underpins cross-border payments. By wiring stablecoin rails directly into a chartered bank, Augustus is positioning this emerging crypto infrastructure as a plumbing upgrade for mainstream institutions, rather than a workaround.

The financing follows Augustus' conditional approval in May for a U.S. national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The company said this made it the eighth bank to win conditional approval since 2010. The startup already counts crypto exchange Kraken among its customers.

"We started Augustus with a simple thesis: the Dollar is the greatest product in the world but its distribution is fundamentally broken," said Ferdinand Dabitz, CEO and co-founder. "This financing lets us execute on our mission to provide high-quality dollar access to international fintechs and banks. It's time to dollarize the world."

Augustus framed the effort partly as a geopolitical bet, noting China's digital yuan and Russia's proposed BRICS Pay as challenges to Western currency dominance. It plans to use the capital to expand across Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where dollar access remains limited.