NEW YORK, April 29, 2026 /CNW/ -- Squads today announced an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures, bringing total funding to $42.9M. This raise accelerates Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.

Stablecoins are changing the infrastructure of business finance. For the last decade, building financial products for businesses meant building on top of banks - bank partnerships were required to hold customer funds and access payment rails. Every new market meant a new bank and a new compliance cycle. Blockchains changed the underlying infrastructure. Stablecoins turned money into software, allowing treasury and payments to be separated from the fractional reserve system for the first time.

This separation has produced a new category of licensed Payment Service Providers (PSPs) that move money across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails. The market has moved quickly: Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion, Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. These PSPs were the missing piece to build a full-stack financial operations platform on stablecoin rails.

Altitude is built on this shift. It does not hold customer funds. Treasury is held in stablecoins. When funds need to move, they settle on stablecoin rails instantly, 24/7, at low cost. When they need to reach traditional banking rails, they do so through a network of licensed stablecoin PSPs.

Since publicly launching in December 2025, Altitude has processed over $200 million in payments for exporters, global agencies, crypto-native companies, and cross-border remote teams. Customers choose Altitude for what stablecoin infrastructure unlocks: global-by-default coverage, multi-currency support, instant settlement, and programmable controls. With $18M in new funding, Altitude is growing its team, expanding its payment network, and accelerating product development.

"This raise backs a simple idea: businesses are better off running on stablecoins than on legacy banking infrastructure. Solana is now mature enough to carry global business finance, regulators have built the frameworks to support it, and for the first time you can build a full financial platform on a genuinely new system," said Stepan Simkin, CEO of Squads.

"The Squads team spent the last four years building the security infrastructure that most of the Solana ecosystem runs on. Stablecoins and programmable blockchains are changing how global finance works. This is the team with the technical depth and the vision to build the financial platform that sits on top of that shift. We believe Altitude will be how the next generation of global businesses runs their financial operations," said Matthew Beck, Head of Solana Ventures.

Two criticisms have historically limited stablecoin adoption in mainstream business finance: compliance gaps and security concerns. Altitude addresses both directly.

On compliance, Altitude has built a proprietary engine that imposes the same checks expected from any regulated fintech: continuous sanctions screening, AML checks, transaction monitoring, and KYB verification. This engine enables every Altitude account to plug into licensed PSPs including Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, Due, and others for global coverage.

On security, Altitude enforces controls at each layer of the stack. At the product layer, every business account comes with programmable controls, granular permissions, and configurable multifactor authentication. At the infrastructure layer, Squads Protocol handles asset custody and money movement, securing over $10 billion in value. At the settlement layer, every transaction is recorded and settled on Solana.

"As we scaled, treasury and payments turned into an operational headache. Complexity and fees kept compounding. Altitude removed both," said Kash Dhanda, COO, Jupiter.

About Squads

Squads is a financial infrastructure company building on Solana. The company operates two products: Squads Multisig, the smart account standard securing over $10 billion in assets across the Solana ecosystem, and Altitude, a financial operating system that gives businesses multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, global payments, APY on balances, and a CFO stack to run it all. Learn more at altitude.xyz or squads.xyz.

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SOURCE Squads