Startup Fun Secures $72 Million to Facilitate Crypto to Fiat Transactions

(SeaPRwire) –   The nitty-gritty details of back-end payment infrastructure are tedious enough to make most people lose interest, even those working in the crypto sector. But Alex Fine, founder and CEO of startup Fun, finds these granular, in-depth payment tasks engaging, and his enthusiasm has delivered tangible results. On Friday, Fun announced it has secured $72 million in funding to partner with high-profile tech firms such as Polymarket, enabling users to deposit and withdraw funds in both cryptocurrency and fiat currencies including the U.S. dollar.

Crypto investment firm Multicoin Capital and tech venture capital firm SignalFire co-led the Series A funding round, which closed at the end of January. Other participating investors include Infinity Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, and Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen. Fine declined to share the valuation at which the capital was raised. This Series A round comes after a previously unannounced $3.9 million seed round the company raised in 2022.

“If you operate a money app or a financial application, how do you actually move funds into and out of the platform?” Fine said in an interview. “That is the core service we excel at providing.”

Serious core operations

Over the past year, major players including Meta, Stripe, and Shopify have all added crypto payment functions to their platforms, following a regulatory shift during the Donald Trump administration. Fun expects more non-crypto companies will join this trend. This outlook has prompted the company to build a business centered on letting users of these platforms convert between digital assets and fiat currency without needing to use a crypto exchange or traditional bank. (Fun works with third-party providers to facilitate conversions across different tokens and currencies.)

26-year-old Fine dropped out of Stanford University in 2020, and spent the following two years testing out a range of startup concepts. He eventually concluded that blockchains will replace the legacy financial databases and physical record-keeping systems of the past. “When you think about where value is stored and hosted right now, there are many trillions of dollars worth of assets that currently exist either in databases or on paper, and over the next 20 years, all of these assets will transition to new systems,” he said.

In 2022, Fine founded Fun as a result. He chose the name because he considered it “iconoclastic”, and also because he already owned the fun.xyz website domain and the @fun username on X. “It is a name no one forgets,” he said.

Fun’s business is far from frivolous. The startup collaborates directly with client companies’ engineering teams to build the payment infrastructure that lets users deposit and withdraw funds from platforms. It processes over $18 billion in payment volume each year, and has built deposit infrastructure for prediction market Polymarket, crypto derivatives platform Lighter, and decentralized lending app Aave, among other clients.

“As fintechs and neobanks around the world begin to adopt tokens and stablecoins, I believe Fun is very well positioned to extend the same services it provides to Polymarket, Lighter and Aave to these non-crypto-native companies over time,” said Spencer Applebaum, a general partner at Multicoin.

Fine shared that Fun has more than 20 clients, but declined to specify the company’s revenue or whether the startup is profitable. He plans to use the $72 million in raised funding to expand the startup’s current team of nearly 30 employees.

“Our core goal is to be the primary entry point for this emerging new economy,” Fine said.