Dakota just raised $12.5 million. But this isn’t about the money. It’s about the system that needed fixing, and the team that finally called its bluff.
Crossborder payments today move like a fax machine stuck in molasses, slow, opaque, overpriced, and powered by infrastructure that predates the Backstreet Boys. Try wiring funds to Singapore on a Friday and you’ll be lucky if they land before your next dental cleaning. Enter Dakota, the New York-based fintech that didn’t come to play cute with banking UX; they came to make the rails run clean, global, and on-chain.
Founded in October 2022 and live in early 2023, Dakota didn’t spend time pitching a dream. They built one. A global business bank account that holds and moves USD via stablecoins but speaks fluent ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT, and SEPA. Translation? Fast, borderless payments without the crypto chaos, or the old-school counterparty roulette. Assets stay in your control. Transactions settle in seconds. And deposits are fully reserved, backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries like it’s Fort Knox on-chain.
Ryan Bozarth, Co-Founder and CEO, brought receipts. As the former CEO of Coinbase Custody and a product boss at Anchorage, Airbnb, and Square, he’s not new to the frontier; he helped draw the map. Gabe G’Sell, Co-Founder and CTO, leads the build with technical precision only a battle-tested engineer can deliver. The team’s DNA reads like a greatest hits album of Web2 and Web3, stitched together in a platform that actually works.
This $12.5 million Series A, led by CoinFund with support from 6th Man Ventures, Triton Ventures (yes, Kraken’s crew), and Digital Currency Group, is gasoline on the fire. Over 500 businesses are already in, with billions in annualized volume flowing through Dakota’s rails. Their clients? Tech startups moving fast, nonprofits moving money globally, and digital-first enterprises tired of banking like it’s 1999.
And they’re not done. Open banking integrations hit in Q3. Multi-currency support lands in Q4. APAC launches by year-end, Latin America’s next. Meanwhile, Dakota’s rolling out virtual corporate cards with customizable spend controls, because if you’re going to manage global treasury from a dashboard, it better feel like a cockpit, not a spreadsheet.
This isn’t your dad’s bank, and it sure as hell isn’t your uncle’s crypto startup. Dakota is the gray space between two broken extremes, where compliance meets composability, and speed finally meets trust. They’re not betting on buzzwords. They’re executing on fundamentals.
Because sometimes the most radical thing you can do in fintech… is build a bank that actually works.
