Rain
Stablecoin-powered cards and payments infrastructure for platforms and fintechs.
Website: https://www.rain.xyz/
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Rain |
| Tagline | Stablecoin-powered cards and payments infrastructure for platforms and fintechs |
| Headquarters | New York, United States |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Stage | Series C |
| Business Model | API / Developer Platform |
| Industry | Fintech |
| Technology | Blockchain / Web3 |
| Geography | Global / Remote-First |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Funding Label | $100M+ |
| Total Disclosed | ~$338M [Stabledash, Jan 2026] |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://www.rain.xyz/
- Careers: https://www.rain.xyz/careers
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rain-855d
- PitchBook: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/493077-52
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Rain is a New York-based payments infrastructure company that lets fintechs, neobanks, and enterprise platforms issue cards, run wallets, and settle global payments using stablecoins as the underlying rail [Rain, retrieved 2026]. The company closed a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ in January 2026 at a reported $1.95B valuation, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $338M and placing it among the better-capitalized companies in the stablecoin payments category [Rain, Jan 2026] [Stabledash, Jan 2026]. Founded in 2021 by Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut, Rain has positioned itself as enterprise-grade middleware between blockchain settlement and traditional card networks, with modular APIs covering issuance, compliance, and liquidity routing [Rain, retrieved 2026]. The company reports more than $3B in annualized transactions across 200+ partners, with named customers including Western Union, Nuvei, and KAST [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026]. The business model is infrastructure-as-a-service: Rain earns from interchange, FX, and platform fees rather than consumer-facing branding, a structure CEO Farooq Malik has described as wanting consumers to never notice the stablecoin underneath [PYMNTS, 2025]. Investor syndicate quality is unusually deep for the stage, with Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer, Galaxy, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest, and Coinbase Ventures all on the cap table [Rain, Jan 2026]. Over the next 12-18 months, the items worth tracking are net revenue retention from the named enterprise logos, regulatory clarity in target corridors (notably the U.S. and Brazil), and whether the company can convert its Visa-program and partner network into a defensible distribution moat before adjacent issuer-processors close the gap.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Rain corporate communications, PR Newswire, Business Wire, and Stabledash.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value | |---| | Stage | Series C [Rain, Jan 2026] | | Business Model | API / Developer Platform [Rain, retrieved 2026] | | Industry / Vertical | Fintech / Payments Infrastructure [Crunchbase] | | Technology Type | Blockchain / Stablecoin Settlement [Rain, retrieved 2026] | | Geography | Global, HQ New York [Rain, Jan 2026] | | Growth Profile | Venture Scale | | Funding | ~$338M total disclosed across Series A, B, C [Stabledash, Jan 2026] |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Rain was founded in 2021 by Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut with the thesis that stablecoins, then mostly used inside crypto trading loops, would become the operational currency for cross-border payroll, merchant payouts, and consumer spending if someone built bank-grade rails around them [Rain, retrieved 2026] [Crunchbase]. The company is headquartered in New York and operates remote-first, with a product surface area that today spans card issuance, wallet infrastructure, blockchain settlement, and compliance tooling [Rain, retrieved 2026].
The funding cadence tells the story of how the market has rerated stablecoin infrastructure. Rain raised a $24.5M round led by Norwest in March 2025 to expand stablecoin-powered card issuing globally [Business Wire, Mar 2025], followed by a $58M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures later in 2024 framed as the round to make Rain "the enterprise stablecoin platform of record" [PR Newswire, 2024]. In January 2026 the company announced a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ at a reported $1.95B valuation, with participation from Sapphire, Dragonfly, Bessemer, Galaxy, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest, and Endeavor Catalyst [Rain, Jan 2026].
Key commercial milestones include partnerships with Lithic to extend card-program reach, an acquisition of Fern to strengthen liquidity routing, and a published case study with Dakota covering a stablecoin-backed business banking card [Rain, retrieved 2026]. The company has also joined the Financial Technology Association, signalling an intent to engage with U.S. policy formation around stablecoin legislation [FTA].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Rain corporate site, Crunchbase, PR Newswire, and Business Wire.
Product and Technology
MIXED
Rain's product is best understood as a vertically integrated issuer-processor for stablecoin balances [PUBLIC]. The platform exposes modular APIs for blockchain settlement, card issuance, and compliance, allowing a fintech or platform to fund a program in stablecoins (typically dollar-denominated) and have end users spend at any Visa-accepting merchant globally [Rain, retrieved 2026]. Rain's own marketing describes the stack as "modular APIs, blockchain settlement, card issuance and compliance," and the company has emphasized that the consumer experience is intentionally indistinguishable from a conventional debit card [Rain, retrieved 2026] [PYMNTS, 2025].
Two customer deployments illustrate the shape of the product [PUBLIC]. Nuvei uses Rain-powered accounts to pay merchants seven days a week in stablecoins, removing the weekend gap inherent to ACH and traditional rails [Rain, retrieved 2026]. Nomad, a Brazil-focused neobank, uses Rain so its customers can save, store, and spend in dollars for everyday purchases ranging from coffee to Starlink subscriptions [Rain, retrieved 2026]. A separate case study with Dakota describes a stablecoin-backed business banking card where Rain handles core compliance and payment infrastructure [Rain, retrieved 2026].
On the technology side, the acquisition of Fern added what Rain describes as a "connective layer of available, permissioned liquidity providers and bank partners" that the multiplex routes customer transactions through [Rain, retrieved 2026]. Open job postings for a Forward Deployed Engineer and a Payments & Privacy Counsel suggest continued investment in customer integration engineering and regulatory infrastructure (inferred from job postings) [AshbyHQ, retrieved 2026].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Rain product documentation, Paymentology client story, and PYMNTS interview.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
Stablecoin payments have moved from a crypto-native curiosity to a category that established payments players are actively building toward. The thesis Rain is selling, and that ICONIQ-led capital is buying, is that stablecoin rails offer materially better unit economics for cross-border payouts, merchant settlement, and dollar-access products in inflationary economies than the correspondent-banking and card-acquiring stacks they replace [Sapphire Ventures] [PYMNTS, 2025].
Rain has not published a third-party TAM figure, and no named research house quote appears in the captured sources, so any market sizing here is anchored to the company's own disclosed transaction volume rather than to an analyst report. The most concrete public number is Rain's own claim of more than $3B in annualized transactions across 200+ partners as of January 2026 [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026]. Sapphire Ventures, in explaining its Series B lead, framed the opportunity as "stablecoins as money," arguing the category is shifting from speculative asset to operational currency for payroll, cloud services, and day-to-day spend [Sapphire Ventures].
| Metric | Value | Source | |---| | Annualized transactions on Rain | $3B+ | [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026] | | Partners on platform | 200+ | [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026] | | Reported valuation, Series C | $1.95B | [Rain, Jan 2026] | | Total disclosed funding | ~$338M | [Stabledash, Jan 2026] |
The demand drivers are reasonably clear. Cross-border payouts remain expensive and slow on legacy rails, dollar demand in emerging markets is structurally rising (Nomad's Brazil use case is the canonical example), and merchant-of-record platforms increasingly want programmable, weekend-inclusive settlement [Rain, retrieved 2026]. Adjacent and substitute markets include traditional issuer-processors (Marqeta, Lithic, Stripe Issuing), correspondent-banking replacements like Wise for Platforms, and crypto-native on/off-ramp providers. Regulatory direction is the largest single variable: U.S. stablecoin legislation, EU MiCA implementation, and Brazilian central bank policy on dollar-denominated balances will each meaningfully expand or constrain the addressable opportunity. Rain joining the Financial Technology Association is consistent with a posture of engaging rather than waiting [FTA].
The analyst takeaway: the available numbers are company-disclosed rather than independently audited, but $3B in annualized volume across 200+ partners with named enterprise logos is a credible signal that this is no longer a pre-product-market-fit category.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Volume and partner figures are company-disclosed via press release; no independent third-party market sizing is captured in the available sources.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
In issuer-processing, the reference points are Marqeta, Lithic, and Stripe Issuing. Rain has chosen partnership over confrontation here, announcing a strategic relationship with Lithic to accelerate global growth of stablecoin-powered payments [Rain, retrieved 2026]. That positioning, treating card-network plumbing as a layer to integrate with rather than rebuild, is a defensible choice given how capital-intensive the processor stack is, but it does mean Rain's differentiation must come from the stablecoin-native settlement and liquidity layers rather than the card rail itself.
In cross-border payouts and stablecoin orchestration, the competitive set includes companies like BVNK, Bridge (acquired by Stripe), and Conduit, alongside crypto-native treasury players. Rain's edge today appears to rest on three things: enterprise customer logos already in production (Western Union, Nuvei, KAST), a deep VC syndicate that funds a longer runway than most competitors enjoy, and the Fern acquisition's liquidity-routing layer that reduces dependence on any single bank partner [Rain, Jan 2026] [Rain, retrieved 2026]. The durability of that edge depends on whether Rain can convert the Western Union relationship in particular into a reference account that locks in similar tier-one financial institutions before Stripe-owned Bridge bundles equivalent functionality into existing Stripe contracts.
Where Rain is most exposed is distribution. Stripe and Adyen already sit inside the checkout flows of much of the global internet economy, and a credible stablecoin settlement product attached to either of those distribution surfaces would compress Rain's window to win the embedded-fintech segment. Rain does not own a consumer brand, an acquiring relationship, or a merchant network of its own, which means every deal is a direct enterprise sale.
The most plausible 18-month scenario: Rain wins if regulatory clarity in the U.S. arrives before the largest distribution-rich incumbents ship competing stablecoin issuance, allowing the company to lock in two or three additional Western Union-tier logos and become the default reference architecture cited in RFPs. Rain loses ground if a Stripe-owned Bridge or an Adyen-built equivalent ships in 2026 with feature parity, in which case the conversation shifts from "who has the best stablecoin stack" to "who already processes our payments," a question Rain cannot answer affirmatively for most prospects.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitive set inferred from category knowledge; no head-to-head competitor is named in the captured sources.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If Rain executes, the prize is becoming the default settlement and issuance layer that sits underneath the next generation of cross-border financial products, a position analogous to what Marqeta occupied for modern card programs in the 2015-2020 cycle.
The headline opportunity is that Rain becomes the enterprise stablecoin platform of record, the piece of infrastructure a CFO at Western Union, a product lead at a Latin American neobank, or a treasurer at a global merchant calls when they want to move dollars programmatically without rebuilding their banking stack. The cited evidence makes that outcome reachable rather than aspirational: $3B in annualized volume across 200+ partners is not a pilot, it is production traffic, and the named customer list (Western Union, Nuvei, KAST, Nomad, Dakota) spans remittance, merchant acquiring, neobanking, and business banking, which suggests the product generalizes across categories rather than fitting one narrow vertical [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026] [Rain, retrieved 2026].
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible | |---| | Embedded enterprise standard | Rain becomes the cited reference architecture for stablecoin issuance inside Fortune 500 financial services | A second tier-one remittance or card network publicly standardizes on Rain following the Western Union deployment | Western Union is already a named partner, providing social proof for risk-averse enterprise buyers [PR Newswire via Morningstar, Jan 2026] | | LatAm dollar-access default | Rain powers the dominant share of dollar-denominated consumer accounts across Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina | Nomad-style neobanks roll out Rain-issued cards at national scale as local-currency volatility persists | Nomad is in production on Rain in Brazil and the consumer use case (saving and spending in dollars) is structurally demanded in inflationary economies [Rain, retrieved 2026] | | Regulatory tailwind capture | U.S. stablecoin legislation passes and Rain becomes a preferred compliance-ready issuer for U.S. banks entering the category | Federal stablecoin framework clarifies issuer obligations and Rain's FTA engagement positions it as a known quantity | Rain has joined the Financial Technology Association and is hiring Payments & Privacy Counsel, consistent with a regulatory-forward posture [FTA] [AshbyHQ, retrieved 2026] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel here is partner-driven liquidity. Each new enterprise customer adds settlement volume, which deepens the liquidity pools Rain routes through (the stated rationale for the Fern acquisition), which lowers the cost and improves the reliability of the next customer's transactions, which makes Rain easier to sell into the next enterprise [Rain, retrieved 2026]. There is also a distribution compounding effect: every named logo (Western Union being the highest-signal example) reduces the perceived risk for the next risk-averse buyer, which is why enterprise infrastructure businesses tend to either escape velocity or stall at a plateau, with little middle ground.
The size of the win. A useful, if imperfect, public comparable is Marqeta, which IPO'd as the modern card-issuing platform of record. If Rain captures even a meaningful share of stablecoin-routed enterprise payment volume over the next five to seven years, the business could plausibly support a multi-billion-dollar public-market valuation in a category that did not meaningfully exist five years ago (scenario, not a forecast). The $1.95B private valuation set in January 2026 [Rain, Jan 2026] gives the company the balance sheet to play the long game; whether it earns the comparable outcome depends on the regulatory and distribution variables outlined above.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios are analyst-constructed from confirmed customer and funding facts; outcomes are inherently forward-looking.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Rain] Rain | Stablecoin-Powered Cards & Payments Infrastructure | https://www.rain.xyz/
[Rain] About Rain | Rebuilding the Pipes Money Moves Through | https://www.rain.xyz/about-us
[Rain, Jan 2026] Why We Raised: Scale Globally With Rain | https://www.rain.xyz/resources/why-we-raised-scale-globally-with-rain
[Rain, Jan 2026] Rain Raises $250M Series C led by ICONIQ | https://www.rain.xyz/resources/rain-raises-250m-series-c-to-scale-stablecoin-powered-payments-infrastructure-for-global-enterprises
[Rain] Careers | https://www.rain.xyz/careers
[Rain] Technology | https://www.rain.xyz/technology
[Crunchbase] Rain Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rain-855d
[PR Newswire, 2024] Rain Raises $58M Series B Led By Sapphire Ventures | https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rain-raises-58m-series-b-led-by-sapphire-ventures-to-become-the-enterprise-stablecoin-platform-of-record-302540587.html
[Business Wire, Mar 2025] Rain Announces $24.5 Million in Funding Led by Norwest | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250324739515/en/Rain-Announces-$24.5-Million-in-Funding-Led-by-Norwest-to-Expand-Stablecoin-Powered-Card-Issuing-Globally
[Stabledash, Jan 2026] Rain Secures $250M Series C at $1.95B Valuation | https://stabledash.com/news/2026-01-09-rain-secures-250m-series-c-at-195b-valuation-to-expand-stablecoin-payments
[Sapphire Ventures] Stablecoins as Money: Why We're Thrilled to Lead Rain's Series B | https://sapphireventures.com/blog/stablecoins-as-money-why-were-thrilled-to-lead-rains-series-b/
[PYMNTS, 2025] Rain's CEO Is Betting the Stablecoin Story May Be One Consumers Never Notice | https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2025/rains-ceo-is-betting-the-stablecoin-story-may-be-one-consumers-never-notice/
[Paymentology] Client Story: Rain | https://www.paymentology.com/client-story-rain
[FTA] FTA Welcomes Innovative Payments Company Rain | https://www.ftassociation.org/fta-welcomes-innovative-payments-company-rain/
[FinTech.am, 2026] Rain hits $1.95bn valuation after $250m Series C | https://www.fintech.am/rain/?lang=en
[PitchBook] Rain (New York) Company Profile | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/493077-52
[AshbyHQ, retrieved 2026] Rain Open Roles | https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/rain
Articles about Rain
- Rain Wants Every Fintech's Card Program Settling in Stablecoins by Sunday — The New York startup just raised $250M from ICONIQ at a $1.95B valuation, with Western Union and Nuvei already routing money through its rails.