Augustus Banks $180M to Put Stablecoins on the Fed's Speed Dial 🏦

Augustus, a startup building a federally chartered clearing bank designed around stablecoins and programmable money, said Tuesday it raised $180 million in a Series B round at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the financing, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel, alongside crypto and fintech figures including Circle co-founder Sean Neville, former Coinbase Chief Technology Officer Balaji Srinivasan, and Rain's Farooq Malik. The company said total funding now stands at $210 million.

Rather than issuing its own stablecoin, Augustus is building infrastructure that lets banks and fintechs 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, running on a proprietary core banking system called Marble that the firm said enables faster settlement and 24/7 availability by deploying AI across the back office. The startup already counts crypto exchange Kraken among its customers.

The financing follows Augustus' conditional approval in May for a U.S. national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which the company said made it the eighth bank to win conditional approval since 2010. Augustus is targeting correspondent banking, the plumbing that lets money move between institutions across borders.

"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."

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