Key takeaways
Squads raised an $18M round led by Solana Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42.9M.
Garrett Harper says Altitude launched publicly five months ago in 150 markets and its team grew from 6 to 30+ people.
He says multi-chain payments and payouts covering Ethereum and Base are coming this month.
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Summary
Squads' Garrett Harper says Altitude, a business finance product built on Solana and stablecoins instead of a bank, is growing fast and adding support for more chains.
Squads has raised an $18M round led by Solana Ventures, which Garrett Harper called "a series a and a half." Other backers include Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital and Collab+Currency, and total funding now stands at $42.9M. The money backs Altitude, a finance product for businesses that runs on stablecoins and Solana.
Five months of growth
Garrett Harper says Altitude launched publicly about five months ago, in 150 markets from day one. The team behind it and the Altitude Card started at six people and is "probably 30 plus today," he says.
The product sits on top of Squads, which Harper says secures about $15B in value for 500+ teams. Squads started five years ago. Harper has been there about two and a half years after joining from Blockworks, where he hosted the Lightspeed podcast.
“If you wanna do treasury management, you can't do that with a card. That is where you need the asset to move permissionlessly on chain twenty four seven”
Garrett HarperNo bank in the stack
Harper says most fintechs build on top of a bank or try to become one, and that Altitude takes "the complete opposite approach" by building on a programmable onchain account on Solana. He says the company has never had a bank account itself and has run on stablecoins for five years, and that employees are paid only in stablecoins.
For bank-linked services, Altitude launched with Bridge as its licensed partner and has since added Infinite and Borderless.
Who it is for
Garrett Harper says the target customer is a company that has raised $1M-$5M, needs to move fast and probably has a global team. He says many users are designers, accountants or lawyers who work with crypto businesses in some way.
What comes next
Harper says Altitude will ship multi-chain payments and payouts this month, so users on Ethereum, Base or other networks get access. He expects the team to automate more functions in the next three months. He predicts that within two years, onchain treasury management will be "the giant differentiator."
Harper first committed to the Solana ecosystem after FTX, when he says many people thought the chain was dead. Now he expects stablecoins to become infrastructure that no one talks about five years from now. In his telling, Altitude is "an Internet company" whose financial plumbing happens to be onchain.
Altitude, Squads, Bridge, and Infinite come up most.
- People
- Garrett Harper
- Drew Rogers
- Nikhil
- Taylor
- Zach Fowler
- Companies
- Altitude
- Squads
- Bridge
- Infinite
- Borderless
- FTX
- Pointbase
- Struggs
- Blockworks
- Coinbase Ventures
- Collab+Currency
- Electric Capital
- Haun Ventures
- Jump Crypto
- L1D
- Placeholder
- Robot Ventures
- Solana Ventures
- Lightspeed
- Dfns
- JPMorgan
- Stripe
