Stablecoins Local Payments: Latitude’s $35M Bet on Simplicity

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A driver in London hands a bag of cash to a middleman so his wages can reach family in Morocco. After a 20% cut, whatever is left finally arrives. That single exchange, witnessed years ago by an Uber payments executive, ended up shaping a company now betting $35 million that stablecoins local payments can replace exactly that kind of informal, costly remittance chain. The company is Latitude, founded by former Stripe and Uber employees who spent years watching cross-border payments fail ordinary people at the last mile. According to Fortune, which first reported the funding round, Latitude has now raised $35 million to build infrastructure that turns stablecoins into money people can actually spend where they live. Key takeaways Latitude, founded by alumni of Stripe and Uber, has raised $35 million to build stablecoin-based local payment infrastructure. The startup’s 15-person team operates out of shared offices in New York, San Francisco, and London. Latitude already holds licenses across 45 U.S. markets and plans to pursue direct regulatory licenses in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Funding will go toward hiring in compliance, engineering, legal, and sales. Clients include neobanks, payroll platforms, marketplaces, and financial firms moving money across borders. Latitude’s Vision and Founding Team Latitude was built by people who had already tried to solve this problem from inside two of the biggest payments companies in the world, and watched where those efforts fell short. The founder, identified as Mathew, spent roughly a decade in Europe leading international payments at Uber, an experience that put him face-to-face with workers sending money home through informal, expensive channels. That London encounter with the Uber driver remitting cash to Morocco became a formative moment. It illustrated, in blunt terms, how much value gets lost when there’s no reliable digital bridge between where money…

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