Rain Partners With Mastercard and Reaches $1.95 Billion Valuation
Stablecoin payments firm Rain has struck a partnership with Mastercard and confirmed a $1.95 billion valuation, marking one of the sharpest rises among the new wave of fintechs building card infrastructure on digital-dollar rails.
Rain provides the plumbing that lets banks and neobanks issue payment cards backed by their customers' stablecoin holdings. Rather than drawing on a US dollar balance, a cardholder's spending can be settled against on-chain deposits, with Rain handling the conversion, treasury and network settlement in the background. The company says its technology already supports more than 200 programmes and facilitates over $3 billion in annualised transaction volume.
A second card network
Until now, Rain has worked exclusively with Visa to issue its stablecoin-linked cards. The Mastercard agreement adds a second major network, allowing Rain to offer both credit and prepaid products and to settle card transactions using stablecoins across Mastercard's infrastructure.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Many large financial institutions are tied closely to a single card network, and a Visa-only proposition shut Rain out of any client committed to Mastercard. With both networks now in place, Rain can pitch its settlement technology to institutions regardless of their existing card relationships, and do so without forcing them to overhaul the payment systems they already run.
A rapid climb
The $1.95 billion valuation follows a $250 million Series C round led by ICONIQ, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer Venture Partners, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed, Norwest and others. It represents a roughly 17-fold increase in valuation over ten months and lifts Rain's total funding past $338 million.
The company reports that its active card base has grown 30 times over the past year, while annualised payment volume has risen 38 times across the same period.
"Stablecoin adoption worldwide requires cards and apps that just work. Our active card base increased 30x, yet we're still early." - Farooq Malik, co-founder and chief executive of Rain
Regulation opens the door
The momentum behind stablecoin-linked cards owes much to a clearer regulatory picture. In the United States, the GENIUS Act has given banks and fintechs firmer ground on which to build digital-dollar products, while Europe's MiCA framework has done similar work across the bloc. That clarity has encouraged established financial institutions to treat stablecoins as a settlement asset rather than a speculative sideline, and infrastructure providers such as Rain are positioning themselves as the bridge between traditional card networks and on-chain money.
For banks weighing how to bring stablecoin functionality to customers without rebuilding their payment stack, the addition of Mastercard alongside Visa makes Rain a more flexible option, and signals that stablecoin settlement is moving steadily into the financial mainstream.
