Another stablecoin startup has raised serious cash. M0, a company that develops stablecoin infrastructure, announced Thursday that it had raised $40 million in a funding round led by the crypto venture capital firm Polychain and the fintech investor Ribbit Capital.
Other participants included the Endeavor Catalyst fund and existing investors like Pantera and Bain Capital Crypto. Luca Prosperi, cofounder and CEO of M0, declined to specify his startup’s valuation. The Series B round was for equity and locked stashes of the startup’s cryptocurrency, or tokens that can only be sold after a set time period. M0 has raised almost $100 million in capital so far.
“We cannot have 1,000 different Tethers and Circles,” Prosperi told Fortune, referring to the two largest issuers of stablecoins. “So what we did is create a layer where different issuers can come and connect and just ensure interoperability, liquidity among themselves.”
Stablecoin buzz
M0 is the latest startup to rake in funding from venture capitalists hungry for exposure to one of the buzziest sectors in crypto.
Over the past year, the once niche asset, which is a cryptocurrency pegged to underlying holdings like the U.S. dollar, has become one of the shiniest objects in Silicon Valley. In June, Circle, the second largest stablecoin issuer next to Tether, went public in a blockbuster IPO that netted the company a market capitalization of now just over $30 billion. And in July, President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act into law, a bill that regulates and defines rules for the burgeoning stablecoin industry.
The buzz has become so loud that Big Tech companies like Meta and Airbnb as well as banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are exploring how to integrate stablecoins into their businesses.
“Stablecoins are proliferating,” Josh Rosenthal, a general partner at Polychain, told Fortune. “This is one of the hotter areas within the market—within all of fintech, frankly,”
Proponents hope that the tokens will become the base layer of financial infrastructure and usher in cheaper, faster payments than bank wires or the international transfer system SWIFT.
That ambition is partly why Prosperi called his startup, which aims to build what he calls the “layer zero of money,” M0. (That’s not to mention that anything to the power of zero is one—just like the dollar value of one stablecoin, he said.)
A longtime finance industry veteran who worked at Morgan Stanley, among other institutions, Prosperi took a deep dive into stablecoins when he started advising MakerDAO, a project that issues a stablecoin controlled by a group of crypto investors, rather than a single entity. (Maker has since rebranded to Sky.)
In 2023, he teamed up with his cofounder Gregory Di Prisco, who also worked at MakerDAO, to launch M0. Their startup develops technology lower on the stablecoin tech stack than, say, the stablecoin company Bridge, which was recently acquired by Stripe.
M0 is building a network on which stablecoin issuers can deploy their tokens and not worry about the nitty gritty software decisions that go into transferring assets across blockchains like Ethereum or Solana or changing, say, Circle’s token into PayPal’s.
For the time being, Prosperi isn’t focused on making his company profitable. Just like Uber, which first expanded its operations across the U.S. before it paid attention to revenue, M0 aims to onboard as many stablecoin issuers onto its network as possible. That includes the crypto wallet MetaMask, which recently announced the launch of its stablecoin in partnership with M0.
“My mandate as a CEO in the next two to five years is to scale this network as much as possible,” said Prosperi. “This is the obsession.”
