The Stablecoin Card Company That Raised Over $300M in 12 Months

An early bet on spendable stablecoins

Charles Yoo-Naut says he and Farouk started Rain towards the end of 2021, after building conviction that cards were the best way to make stablecoins globally accepted. He says he was frustrated in 2022 and 2023 when people were still looking for crypto use cases, because moving money in traditional fintech was "so broken."

Settling on Visa rails in USDC

Rain settles with Visa Inc in USDC seven days a week, including holidays and weekends, paying for each day's volume. Charles Yoo-Naut says some Visa merchants already receive stablecoins, so for certain purchases stablecoins pass from cardholder to merchant on Visa rails. As a non-bank principal member of Visa, he says, Rain replaces the bank partner, program manager and reseller in the issuing stack.

He expects the line between a stablecoin payment and a card payment to blur, leaving "value being transacted on a network."

Customers and faster launches

Charles Yoo-Naut says any financial product can be delivered faster, cheaper and in more markets on stablecoin rails. Rain announced a partnership with Western Union for remittances. He says a traditional banking partner can take six months a year to issue a first card, while one Rain customer went live in 17 days, helped by tools from Mintlify, Coast and Stainless.

Scaling with agents

Charles Yoo-Naut says Rain wants to avoid Block's over-hiring and weighs each hire against what AI will do in 12 or 24 months. He says one compliance person can be armed with 10 agents, and the single business development lead, Nick, works with 20 agents.

On agentic commerce, he says agents already use existing cards, and tokens such as Visa Inc Intelligent Commerce make this safer. He describes an emerging idea of "know your agent," and says Rain does not let staff use Cloudbot because the controls are not there yet.