🟪 Well-meshed approaches

Welcome to the Daily, takeover edition. This Sunday’s newsletter is brought to you by Empire’s Katherine Ross:

Mesh CEO Bam Azizi won’t be going back to the normal way of raising venture capital. And by that I mean, he won’t be waiting on a wire transfer to settle in Mesh’s bank account. 

Instead, he prefers to receive it in stablecoins.

Earlier this week, Mesh announced that it raised $82 million in a Series B led by Paradigm. The money was then sent over to Mesh using PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD, using his own firm’s technology. 

Pretty fitting if you ask me, given that PayPal Ventures participated in their Series A.

Binance recently announced that Abu Dhabi’s MGX also sent over its investment via stablecoins, though the sum was just a smidge bigger — a cool $2 billion. 

“It kind of makes sense,” Azizi told me. Why wait a week or so for a wire transfer when you can immediately settle with stablecoins? Perhaps both Azizi and Binance will be trendsetters here.

Any further raises Azizi does will also be stablecoin-exclusive. 

“I’m tired of calling banks and manually confirming,” he griped. “Is it the 1990s? Come on, you can do better.”

Azizi told me the round happened rather quickly — a matter of weeks instead of months. He sent out an update to the investors he was talking to back in January, and then suddenly, he was preparing data to finalize the firm's newest round. 

(Azizi even admitted that he had even pushed back on some of the initial terms “to buy some time,” and then they were ready to finalize the funding.)

Mesh last raised $22 million in a Series A back in 2023, so it’s not a surprise that their business update — coming on the heels of success around stablecoins — would pick up interest from VCs like Consensys, QuantumLight, Paradigm, etc. 

Oh, wait, let me back up a second: Mesh is a crypto payments firm. Azizi’s goal is to simplify payments so that they pass the “Grandma test” — which should be pretty obvious, but basically just means that anyone can make payments with crypto. 

The firm’s been working to develop itself as a bridge for roughly five years now, with a special focus on stablecoins starting around two years ago. 

Mesh takes an agnostic approach to the space. They don’t have direct interaction with consumers, unlike some of the firms we’ve spoken to in this newsletter, but their technology instead connects the networks and allows the consumer to then make a payment. 

“That's how we stand out: by building that network versus competing with all these players. They are competing with each other. We [...] want to be the connection layer, connecting and bridging all the gaps between these two,” he explained.

As Mesh solves for the payments experience, the belief is that folks will start actually using crypto for payments rather than sitting on a portfolio of memecoins.

“Last year, we had $27 trillion in transactions on stablecoins. That's more than Visa and Mastercard combined. And if that's not enough, plus 7% on top. So if you combine these two numbers, our projection is [that] at some point you will have more crypto holders than credit card holders,” Azizi told me.

Mesh will use the freshly raised $82 million to expand globally, which means not only going to new markets but also hiring in those areas. 

After all, “you have to be global from the get-go,” Azizi told me.

Now, onto the roundup:

— Katherine Ross