Key takeaways
Squads closed $18M led by Solana Ventures to scale Altitude Card, bringing total funding to $42.9M.
Stepan Simkin says Altitude Card collapses five financial tools that crypto-native teams use today into a single product.
He expects automated accounts payable on Altitude Card by the end of the year, with agents buying software and services for operators.
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Summary
CEO Stepan Simkin pitches Altitude as one onchain product that replaces a business's banking tools, with banks becoming optional settlement rails.
Squads has closed $18M led by Solana Ventures to scale Altitude Card, its stablecoin-based financial operating system for businesses. The round included Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Electric Capital, Jump Crypto and others, and brings total funding to $42.9M. CEO Stepan Simkin explained the product and the thinking behind it in an interview.
Five tools in one
Stepan Simkin says crypto-native teams today juggle a Coinbase account for onramps, Mercury for banking and Brex for cards, among others, and that Altitude Card is "collapsing these five tools into a single product." He names access, velocity and autonomy as the core properties the team designs for. On velocity, he describes sending somebody a million dollars in seconds, "twenty four seven." The interview also covered how Bridge unlocked stablecoin-to-fiat conversion for the product.
“Thinking of a bank as a place where you go and onboard and this is where you store the money and this is where the core workload workloads happen is kind of antithetical to, you know, the way Internet works.”
Stepan SimkinBuilt on Squads Protocol
The product sits on Squads Protocol, which Simkin says lets a business set rules per key, such as allowing a key to interact with only five addresses and capping its spending. He says Squads chose to build Altitude Card as a focused product layer rather than a generic API, to channel the technology "into solving very specific problems for real customers." On chain choice, he says it "wasn't a big conversation internally": Solana "is the payments chain" because of its balance of scalability, decentralization and DeFi. He notes Solana Ventures invested before but is leading a Squads round for the first time.
Agents and automation
Stepan Simkin expects agents to procure software and services for operators on Altitude Card, pointing out that API credits from OpenAI and Anthropic can already be paid for through MPP. He says automated accounts payable will arrive on Altitude Card by the end of the year. Five years out, he wants businesses to design rules and parameters once and get "an automated working template that just executes itself."
Banks as modules
Simkin sees banks as modular: money lives in a programmable onchain account, and a business taps a US bank only when it wants to settle through a specific rail. He argues that holding a banking license, keeping customers' yield and charging payment fees "is over," because technology is democratizing that model.
With new capital and Solana Ventures leading for the first time, Squads is betting that programmable accounts on Solana can absorb the daily work of business finance. In Stepan Simkin's view, banks shift from holding the money to serving as one settlement option among several.
Squads, Solana Ventures, Column, and FUSE come up most.
- People
- Stepan Simkin
- Drew Rogers
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- Squads
- Solana Ventures
- Column
- FUSE
- Replit
- Anthropic
- Brex
- Coinbase
- Mercury
- OpenAI
- Temple
- Western Union
- Bridge
- Coinbase Ventures
- Collab+Currency
- Electric Capital
- Haun Ventures
- Jump Crypto
- L1D
- Placeholder
- Robot Ventures
- Dfns
- Stripe
- Visa Ventures
