Velocity, a next-generation fintech infrastructure platform, has emerged from stealth and announced a $10 million pre-seed funding round, Europe’s largest of its kind so far this year. The investment round was led by Activant Capital, with participation from Fuel Ventures, Triton Capital, Fabric Ventures, Commerce Ventures, and Preface Ventures. It also attracted a powerful roster of strategic shareholders, including current and former executives from Stripe, Visa, Google, PayPal, Circle, and Worldpay.
Currently, the company has 11 employees across London, New York, and Warsaw, and expects to grow to 30 by the end of the year, with a focus on engineering and regulatory operations. Its growth strategy is anchored in three areas: product depth, regulatory reach, and enterprise integration.
What are the major challenges facing your industry?
The key challenge isn’t whether digital assets are coming and the shift is already underway. With over 25 countries introducing stablecoin regulations and frameworks emerging across the UK, EU, US, and Singapore, the financial system is evolving. The real question is how quickly enterprises can adopt this new infrastructure and how well it integrates with the systems they already use.
This challenge sits at the intersection of innovation and implementation: building solutions that are compliant, scalable, and truly enterprise-ready, not experimental or siloed.
That’s where Velocity is focused. While others approach this space from a crypto-first perspective, the company understands what enterprise adoption really takes: trust, flexibility, and seamless integration into existing financial workflows. Velocity isn’t here to replace the financial system, but to make it work better.
How was the idea born?
Tom Greenwood and Eric Queathem knew each other through a partnership between Volt and Worldpay but it wasn’t until a chance encounter on a flight to Money20/20 that they connected properly. Tom had seen the problem firsthand as founder of Volt, a real-time payments company, and IFX, a cross-border FX treasury business. Eric Queathem spent nearly a decade at Worldpay, where he led global product and growth across crypto, payouts, and international markets. Both had dealt with the same structural friction: high FX costs, delayed settlement, and operational complexity at scale.
Tom had a spare ticket to a U2 concert at The Sphere in Las Vegas. Eric joined. Somewhere between the flight and the encore, the conversation got interesting. At the time, Tom was the CEO of Volt, a leading European fintech specialising in real-time payments. Eric was on the executive team at Worldpay, leading growth and global strategy.
In 2024, both coincidentally stepped away from their respective roles, but stayed in touch. Eric had been exploring a new approach to FX and treasury. Tom was deep in stablecoins. Over lunch, they compared notes and halfway through, the penny dropped: FX, stablecoins, and treasury weren’t isolated problems. They were symptoms of the same underlying friction.
What began as a conversation quickly became a vision: to build a unified infrastructure layer that brings stablecoins into the core of enterprise finance not as an add-on, but as a foundation. That idea became Velocity.
The founders’ combined experience in payments, FX, and digital assets directly shaped Velocity’s mission to solve for fragmented capital flows and operational inefficiencies at enterprise scale.
What’s interesting about this business model?
The gap between how business moves and how money moves has become too wide to ignore. That problem is exactly what led them to create Velocity. The landscape is now shifting. Across major markets, including the US, UK, EU, and Singapore, regulatory frameworks for stablecoins and digital money are taking shape. As clarity emerges, enterprise demand is accelerating for infrastructure that bridges today’s analog systems, with tomorrow’s digital economy.
Velocity integrates regulated stablecoins into the existing financial architecture, enabling enterprises to move, hold, and manage capital across banks, blockchains, and borders. Purpose-built for global business, the platform delivers instant settlement, coordinated liquidity across fiat and digital assets, and automated, policy-driven payments. This isn’t about replacing what exists. It’s about upgrading how money moves, and how it’s managed.
Velocity’s unified account architecture combines virtual IBANs, secure digital wallets, and regulated custody, giving enterprises a single, real-time view of capital across both traditional banking systems and stablecoin networks. The platform features programmable payments, real-time FX with smart routing, liquidity orchestration, and a unified treasury ledger, addressing systemic inefficiencies in cross-border settlement and liquidity management.
What does the company do? What sets it different?
The company is building the infrastructure layer for enterprise payments and treasury, enabling businesses to move, hold, and manage capital in real-time across both fiat and digital assets. The platform is purpose-built to solve systemic inefficiencies in cross-border settlement, payments, and liquidity management.
At its core is a unified account architecture that combines virtual IBANs, secure digital wallets, and regulated custody, giving enterprises a single view of capital across traditional banking systems and stablecoin networks. This makes it easy to manage liquidity, automate payments, and settle globally without relying on fragmented providers or disparate systems.
The platform includes programmable payments, real-time FX with smart routing, liquidity orchestration, and a unified treasury ledger. Whether paying vendors, settling merchant flows, or managing internal liquidity across currencies, Velocity enables faster, compliant, and cost-effective execution.
Where others take a crypto-first approach, Velocity comes from payments. Founded by Tom Greenwood (Volt, IFX) and Eric Queathem (Worldpay), the team brings deep experience in scaling global financial infrastructure. That foundation shapes how they build: for enterprise, at scale, and with regulatory integrity. Velocity isn’t just simplifying and speeding global payments. It unifies the infrastructure that powers them.
Velocity enables enterprises to streamline how they move and manage capital across borders, solving for critical use cases like high-value cross-border settlement, vendor payments, and multi-currency treasury flows. These are areas where legacy systems remain slow and fragmented.
Unlike many competitors, Velocity’s infrastructure is designed for compliance, programmability, and integration with both legacy and digital systems, allowing enterprises to manage capital globally from a single platform.
Competition landscape
Prominent players in the space include BVNK, Bridge, and Zero Hash. While many are focused on providing access to digital asset rails for payment, Velocity is building the infrastructure to manage capital flows at enterprise scale. It offers a unified account architecture that combines virtual IBANs, secure wallets, regulated custody, and FX into one programmable, compliant system. This gives businesses a single platform to move, hold, and manage capital globally with visibility and control.
Velocity’s approach differs from crypto-native competitors by building from payments expertise and regulatory fluency, enabling seamless integration with enterprise workflows and addressing compliance needs from day one.
Our thoughts
The launch comes as regulatory frameworks in the US, UK, EU, and Singapore mature, creating a favourable climate for enterprise stablecoin adoption. Central banks are warming up to tokenised money. Corporate treasuries are exploring blockchain for real-time settlement. And forward-thinking CFOs are seeking alternatives to outdated SWIFT transfers and siloed liquidity pools.
In this context, Velocity’s platform offers what many have long needed: a single integration point to move capital across traditional and digital systems without compromising security, compliance, or reliability.
“The future of finance isn’t about replacing the old with the new. It’s about intelligently integrating both,” said Tom Greenwood, co-founder and CEO. “We’re not chasing crypto hype — we’re using stablecoins to remove friction, accelerate settlement, and drive improved performance of real-world financial operations.”
“We’ve experienced first-hand the financial complexity of operating a global business — the fragmentation of providers, the lack of transparency, and the workarounds,” said Eric Queathem, co-founder and President. “Velocity is built to eliminate that friction with infrastructure that scales, adapts, and solves the real-world problems large enterprises face every day moving and managing money around the world.”
“Velocity isn’t just solving cross-border payments — it’s rethinking how enterprises manage FX, liquidity, and treasury through stablecoin infrastructure,” said Andrew Steele, Partner at Activant Capital. “Tom and Eric bring the rare technical depth and regulatory fluency needed to build and scale a product like this. We’ve shared this vision for years — and now is the time to bring it to life.”
“Velocity is building foundational infrastructure for the future of global finance,” said Shiv Patel, Partner at Fuel Ventures. “We backed Tom at Volt, and we’re proud to back him again. Tom and Eric bring rare depth in navigating regulation, scaling enterprise platforms, and solving the real-world operational challenges that define success.”
“We’re proud to support Velocity as a strategic partner,” said Michael Shaulov, Founder and CEO at Fireblocks. “As demand for stablecoin-based payment infrastructure accelerates, the market needs trusted, enterprise-ready solutions. Velocity is bringing a thoughtful approach to this next chapter of digital payments.”
