Let’s talk about Cybrid, because when a fintech startup locks in $10M in Series A funding, it’s not noise, it’s signal. A shift. A jolt through the fintech bloodstream from Toronto to Newark. Cybrid isn’t chasing headlines; it’s coding a new backbone for how money moves. Led by Avinash Chidambaram, Brent Carrara, and Michael Carrara, this crew isn’t building hype, they’re building the rails that’ll carry the future of finance. An API-first platform fusing fiat, stablecoins and compliance into one clean flow. Where old-school payment networks charge a premium for friction, Cybrid slices that down by up to 90%.
Avinash Chidambaram has been architecting payments longer than most startups have existed. The guy helped bring Apple Pay to Canada, built the Interac Token Platform, and scaled E-transfer to $100B+ in volume. That’s not buzz, that’s legacy. Brent Carrara, Ph.D., brings the encryption muscle, a cryptography veteran whose playbook runs from Thinking Capital to CSIS. He builds security like an art form. Michael Carrara’s the engineer who turned blockchain infrastructure into business infrastructure, leading Blockset at BRD before Coinbase came calling. Together, they built a fintech machine that runs as tight as their codebase. Add Dean Brauer, the GoHenry co-founder who grew kids’ banking into millions of households before Acorns acquired it, and Ali Irshad, who turned crypto sales into strategy at Coinsquare and Airmeet, and you’ve got a leadership mix that’s fluent in both finance and firepower.
This $10M round, led by BDC Capital’s Growth Venture Fund with Golden Ventures, Luge Capital and Panache Ventures, isn’t a moonshot, it’s a launch sequence. Cybrid’s mission: make stablecoins the default rails for financial institutions, remittance networks and B2B payments. The market’s already listening. Stablecoin payment volume has doubled YoY to $5.7T, roughly 25% of card network volume. Cybrid’s platform taps into FedNow, RTP and 70% of U.S. banks while serving 150+ countries. And when you’re cutting costs by 90%, enabling real-time settlement, and staying fully compliant with KYC, KYB, AML and ATF built-in, you’re not competing, you’re leading.
The company hit 5x growth this past year and secured OSC registration in Jan 2025, unlocking full-scale Canadian ops. Businesses can go from integration to live payments in just 8 weeks, because in a world where finance moves at internet speed, latency kills. The $10M Series A isn’t fuel for ideas, it’s gas for execution. Cybrid isn’t one thing, it’s everything payment should’ve been by now.
