I am excited to announce our new investment from Fund II in Frame, a US company building the settlement layer for global finance. Institutions settle payments in seconds across bank rails, stablecoins and tokenized deposits through a single integration. Compliance is checked inside the settlement, so a payment that fails never leaves. Every settlement carries evidence that auditors and regulators can verify independently.
Here is a great short video from the founders, explaining what Frame does.
The round
We participated in Frame’s Seed round, alongside a group of FinTech operators and angels from the payments sector.
Why it matters
Every day trillions of dollars move through payment systems built in the 1970s. A payment company sending $10m from New York to Singapore on a Friday afternoon goes through three banks in the middle, pays a fee at each one, and sees the money land sometime the following week. For most of that time, nobody can say where it is.
Frame replaces that with a single layer which institutions connect to. No new core system, no new ledger. One connection covers the traditional rails, wires, ACH, SEPA, SWIFT, alongside stablecoins, tokenized deposits and other digital currencies. The payment then settles on whichever is best, in seconds rather than days. Sanctions screening, limits and jurisdiction rules are applied inside the settlement, so a payment that fails its checks never moves, and each one comes out with a proof that the auditor, the regulator and the counterparty can verify without accessing any private information.
That last part is the hard bit. Compliance has always been bolted onto payments after the fact, which is why the established players, ACI Worldwide, FIS and Mastercard/BVNK, reach plenty of rails but were designed before tokenized deposits existed. The timing makes this particularly relevant. B2B stablecoin payment volumes stand above $390b this year and are forecast to pass $1t by 2030.
Traction
The platform is in production, with four products live
Built for 4.7m transactions/sec against 76k for the largest card network
A regulated base in Canada, with licensing underway in the US, UK and EU
A team hired out of Circle, Kraken, Curve, Blockdaemon and Railsr
Team
This is a very experienced team with prior exits. Alexander, the CEO, is a second-time founder, after close to 20 years in B2B payments, he co-founded Merchant Broker, a payments orchestration platform, and sold it to AMCS Group (EQT) in 2022. Lloyd, the CTO, held the same role at Blockdaemon, taking the engineering team from 9 to 200 and the company from startup to a $3.25b valuation.
They are joined by Nathalie as COO, a role she previously held at Curve and at American Express, and Noah, who leads North America after being Circle’s first go-to-market hire. The board adds two more founders, Petter Made (co-founder of SumUp) and Charlie Delingpole (founder of ComplyAdvantage), with former FDIC Chair Jelena McWilliams advising.
