Mural Raises $15 Million Series A After Cross-Border Payments API Processes $2.1 Billion Across 128 Countries
Oct. 23, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
Mural has raised $15 million in Series A financing, bringing its total funding to $28 million. The company provides payment infrastructure that connects traditional banking and blockchain rails while managing the financial licenses, partner bank relationships and local settlement integrations behind them. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed $2.1 billion in payments across 128 countries.
The company plans to place more engineers directly with enterprise clients to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory and banking requirements. Its platform also uses a policy and compliance engine to apply controls such as approved counterparty lists, transfer caps and additional approvals for large transactions. Mural counts Deel, Opera and Axexo among its enterprise clients. The financing comes as research cited in the verified data points to substantial stablecoin payment activity, although the available figures measure different periods and types of flows. Mural did not disclose a valuation for the round.
Mural has raised $15 million in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $28 million as it develops payment infrastructure spanning traditional banking and blockchain rails. The financing follows a $5 million seed round raised in 2022 and earlier interim financing. Mural did not disclose its valuation for the Series A.
The company’s proposition is to give enterprise platforms a way to move payments across different markets without building every underlying banking, licensing and settlement connection themselves. That task can become more complicated when a payment involves both conventional accounts and blockchain-based transfers. Mural says it manages the financial licenses, partner bank relationships and local settlement integrations that support those routes, while providing clients with an application programming interface, or API, through which software systems can access its services.
Since launching that API in 2025, Mural has processed $2.1 billion in payment volume across 128 countries, according to the company. It also reported that its payment processing volume in 2026 has grown to nearly six times the amount processed during all of 2025. Those are company-reported operating figures; the available information does not break down the volume by payment route, customer or market.
Building for enterprise payments
Mural’s current enterprise clients include global payroll platform Deel, browser developer Opera and fintech company Axexo. Their inclusion illustrates the range of businesses on its client roster, though the available information does not specify which Mural services each uses or the volume processed on their behalf.
The company was co-founded in 2022 by chief executive officer Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, both former engineers at Palantir. Its approach combines software access with operational work that can vary by jurisdiction. A payment platform serving clients in multiple countries must account for differences in banking arrangements and regulatory requirements; Mural says it handles underlying relationships and integrations rather than leaving client platforms to assemble them independently.
That operating model is particularly relevant to payroll and corporate payments, where a platform may need to restrict who can receive funds and who can authorize a transfer. Mural’s policy and compliance engine applies programmatic controls including approved counterparty lists, account transfer caps and tiered approval requirements for large transactions. In practical terms, these controls are intended to make payment rules part of the transaction workflow rather than relying solely on checks outside it.
Local requirements shape the next phase
Mural’s engineering team plans to expand its use of “forward-deployed” engineers: staff embedded directly with enterprise clients to address jurisdiction-specific regulatory and banking requirements. The plan points to a limit of a purely standardized software rollout. Even when clients connect through the same API, the banking and compliance work needed to support payments can differ from one market to another.
The available information does not specify how many engineers Mural intends to deploy, where they will be based or a timetable for the expansion. It also does not allocate the new financing among engineering, compliance or other activities. The confirmed next step is the planned expansion of client-embedded engineering support, not a disclosed launch schedule for additional markets or products.
Stablecoin activity provides context
The funding comes against a backdrop of substantial reported stablecoin payment activity. Alvarez & Marsal data put global stablecoin payment volume at approximately $400 billion in the first eight months of 2026. Separately, Chainalysis tracked $220 billion in cross-border stablecoin flows from July 2025 through June 2026. The figures cover different periods and measures, so they should not be treated as directly comparable estimates of the same activity.
Those market figures also do not establish how much of Mural’s own volume used stablecoins. What Mural has disclosed is the overall value processed through its API, its geographic reach and the growth it reports for 2026. Together with its stated plans for embedded engineering, those disclosures show a business focused not only on connecting payment rails but also on the local banking and compliance work required to use them for enterprise transactions.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.