Squads Raises $18M on a Simple Bet: Your Business Doesn't Need a Bank Account

Squads today announced an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto and Robot Ventures. This brings the total raised to $42.9M and accelerates Altitude, a financial operating system built entirely on stablecoin infrastructure.

Our bet is simple: your business doesn't need a bank account.

For a decade, building a fintech meant building on top of banks. You needed bank partnerships to hold customer funds and bank relationships to access payment rails. Every new market meant a new license, a new integration, and a new compliance cycle.

New technologies challenge these assumptions. Blockchains democratized global ledgers you can build on. Stablecoins turned money into software. Where money is stored and how it moves can now be two separate decisions. For stablecoin adoption to accelerate, you need to connect the new system to the legacy one.

Orchestration infrastructure emerged to close this gap. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion and Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. Both deals point to the same trend: a new class of stablecoin PSPs (Payment Service Providers) are emerging to facilitate stablecoin-to-fiat conversion across global and local payment systems.

Altitude lets you run your business on stablecoins. We are a financial operating system, not a bank. We don't hold customer funds. Your treasury is held as stablecoins and your money moves across traditional banking rails through a network of licensed PSPs. Altitude gives frontier businesses access to multi-currency accounts, corporate cards, global payments, APY on balances, and a CFO stack to run it all.

With this round we're announcing the two pieces of infrastructure that make Altitude work at scale: the engine that connects businesses to the new PSP network, and the security architecture for accounts that don't sit inside a bank.

1. The engine that connects to the new PSP network

The new PSP network only delivers value if you can actually reach it. Providers like Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, and the many new entrants have their own onboarding requirements, KYB process, and verification flow. A business that needs to satisfy each one separately would spend weeks on compliance before sending a single payment. This friction recreates the very problem these PSPs were built to solve.

A customer onboards to Altitude once. We handle onboarding to all partners downstream through a custom-built verification engine that runs the same checks you'd expect from any regulated fintech: continuous sanctions screening, AML checks, transaction monitoring, and KYB verification. When a new PSP plugs in, every existing customer gets access to their rails with no re-onboarding. This enables every Altitude account to plug into PSPs like Bridge, MoonPay, Infinite, Due, and others for global coverage and competitive pricing.

When a customer moves money, Altitude routes through the optimal provider for that corridor. The customer sees ACH, SEPA, Wire, SWIFT, and stablecoin settlement from one balance. As more PSPs enter the market and competition on price and performance intensifies, the engine passes those gains through to customers without any change on their end. Today that covers 150+ countries. The more the PSP market grows, the more Altitude can offer without building any of the rails ourselves.

2. Full control over your funds, with the security architecture to back it up

When you control your funds, the security model changes. There's no institution absorbing losses on your behalf. The architecture has to be right the first time.

Every Altitude account is its own programmable smart account onchain, powered by Squads' underlying protocol, which secures over $10 billion in value. Accounts are a distinct onchain object with their own rules, permissions, and signing requirements, not a row in a database.

The architecture has two layers.

At the member level, each person on the account has their own programmable smart account secured by multiple independent keys: a passkey and two email-based keys, provided by two separate infrastructure vendors, Privy and Turnkey. No single key is sufficient to authorize a transaction. Multi-factor authentication is enforced by the protocol itself, onchain, for every member. Because Privy and Turnkey operate independently, a compromise of either vendor leaves the account intact and ensures business continuity in case of downtime. You are never reliant on a single key management vendor.

At the business account level, administrators have full control over how the account is structured. They define what signing factors are required, with the ability to enforce hardware key requirements like a Ledger or YubiKey across the entire team, and set approval thresholds that require multiple signers before any payment above a defined amount executes. Every transaction settles on the Solana blockchain, permanently auditable on a public ledger with no single party in control.

Your money is always there. It is not fractionally reserved. It is not lent out to counterparties you have no relationship with. If every customer tries to withdraw their stablecoin balances from Altitude at the same time, they can. Whether you want to move $10 or $100 million, you can transfer your funds 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The money you see on the screen is sitting on the blockchain, fully reserved, fully in your control. No bank can say the same.

Frontier companies are already running this way

Since publicly launching in Q4 2025, Altitude has processed $200M+ in payments across 50+ countries - exporters, global contractors, crypto-native companies, remote-first teams running payroll across currencies.

Businesses chose Altitude because it aligns with how they run their operations. The stablecoin infrastructure is just the underlying layer. What matters is a system that's global by default, offers transaction-level controls, and removes the need to onboard to a new platform in every market.

For decades, banks bundled three things into one institution: where money is stored, how it moves, and how compliance is enforced. That bundling was a limitation of the system, not a feature of good finance.

Stablecoins pull those apart. Money lives onchain, movement routes across providers, and compliance verifies once and applies everywhere. Once those pieces separate, there's no reason for a single institution to sit in the middle of every transaction.

What used to require a bank now requires a financial operating system. Altitude is that system.