Augustus Reaches Unicorn Status with $180 Million Series B to Build a Clearing Bank for the Stablecoin Era
Augustus Reaches Unicorn Status with $180 Million Series B to Build a Clearing Bank for the Stablecoin Era #
Augustus, a New York-based startup building a clearing bank for programmable money, has raised $180 million in a Series B round that values the company at $1 billion. Tiger Global led the round, with participation from Hummingbird, QED Investors, and founders of several fintech companies including Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel, according to the company.
The raise brings Augustus’s total funding to $210 million since its founding in 2022 by Ferdinand Dabitz, Joshua Becker, Simon Wimmer, and Peter Lieck. The company, which previously operated under the name Ivy, describes its goal as building a “Global Dollar Bank”: an API-first clearing bank giving international fintechs, banks, and crypto companies direct, programmable access to dollar accounts and payment rails.
Augustus says it is already processing billions of dollars in volume for clients including crypto exchange Kraken, and currently operates euro clearing through a regulated entity in Finland. Its platform supports operating and for-benefit-of accounts with named virtual accounts, and lets customers move funds across Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoin networks. The company says it does not intend to issue its own stablecoin, but to serve as neutral infrastructure connecting traditional payment systems with blockchain-based rails.
Augustus received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter in May, a development the company cited as central to the fundraise. Once final approval is secured, the company plans to add direct access to U.S. dollar clearing. Capital from the Series B will be deployed to serve financial institutions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
The company will also continue developing Marble, its proprietary core banking platform, which it says enables faster settlement times and round-the-clock availability through AI-driven back-office automation. Augustus’s leadership team includes Greg Quarles, a former bank chief executive and senior OCC regulator, and Benjamin Alexander, previously chief compliance officer at Column and an executive at JPMorgan and HSBC. In a statement, Dabitz said correspondent banking remains one of the last parts of the banking stack yet to be seriously disrupted by fintechs, and that Augustus intends to change that.
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