Latitude Launches Today, After a Decade of Learnings
Ten years, four roles, three corners of the world. Each stop revealed a new layer of why global payments were broken and what new solutions were lacking. At some point, you realize you've seen enough, and it's time to build. A quick look back at the learnings that led to today.
Lesson 1: Instant and Affordable
In 2015, I was at Uber, focused on expansion across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Working on paying drivers across 50+ countries gave me direct exposure to the pain points of cross-border payments: lengthy settlement times and high fees. And the top requested feature from drivers was instant payments. When a colleague introduced me to Bitcoin, I began to consider whether blockchains could help solve this problem.
Lesson 2: Simplicity and Trust
That curiosity led me to Coinbase, where I helped the company launch internationally and led USDC growth efforts in partnership with Circle in the early days, well before stablecoins had found product-market fit. What I took away: simplicity, trust, and regulation are the price of entry for crypto to go mainstream. At the time, stablecoins had none of these. The prevalent use case involved fleeing for a “safe” asset after losing big on the latest volatile token.
Lesson 3: Utility
In early 2021, I joined Stripe to initially lead expansion efforts, but eventually helped lead the company’s journey back into crypto, which had ironically been banned at the company when I arrived. A year later, we launched USDC payouts to creators as our first product, opening up 100+ markets that we couldn’t reach with traditional banking rails. Unfortunately, that iteration of the product was a flop with basically no adoption. I started to wonder: “Were stablecoins not the obvious solution for global payments?” When talking to users, the same answer kept coming up. "What do I do with stablecoins in my local country, like Vietnam or Colombia? I need to buy things at home, like groceries or coffee.” The stablecoin wasn't the problem. The missing piece was local fiat connectivity.
Introducing Latitude
After my last role, I took nearly a year off before starting Latitude, which gave me much-needed clarity. No one was solving this the right way. Companies were building on borrowed infrastructure, moving fast but sacrificing long-term scalability. Some focused on “crypto” use cases (trading, swapping, staking, etc) while others offered stablecoin payouts without meaningful local fiat rails.
Building this right requires getting licensed, building your own infrastructure with direct bank and stablecoin-issuer integrations (no middlemen), and doing the hard, unglamorous work of building liquidity and local payment connectivity across dozens of markets. Then, making it simple to actually use.
Go-to-market for the space also needs disruption. Visit any cross-border payments website and try to find their pricing. You can’t. It takes sales calls, demos, projected volume spreadsheets, and weeks of back-and-forth before you know what you’ll pay, and then a lengthy onboarding begins. Smaller businesses get the short end of that stick every time.
We're changing that. Our flagship product is Global Fiat Payouts: starting at 0.5% flat for any US business to pay out across every market we serve, no volume commitments, onboarding in days, not months. Traditional cross-border providers are built on old rails and layers of middlemen, and you pay for every one of them. Newer stablecoin companies have the new rails but not the liquidity network or local connectivity to price competitively. We've spent 15 months building both. The result is the true interbank FX rate, no hidden spreads, and stablecoin rails running 24/7 at a price that reflects what the infrastructure actually costs to build right.
Our second live product is International Stablecoin On-and-Off-Ramps, embeddable directly into wallets and fintechs, giving retail users a seamless path between local fiat and stablecoins. Pricing is market-specific, with competitive rates across supported corridors. This is the first in a broader set of stablecoin utilities and developer tools launching throughout 2025. In May, we begin pilots of USD Stablecoin Ramps + Virtual Accounts for businesses that need seamless USD/stablecoin conversion for their customers. This is a small preview of what we are building in this category.
The team
I've learned a lot building in this space, but the clearest lesson is this: bet on the team. I've known my co-founder and CTO, Brian, for almost 15 years, having met at Facebook and worked together again at Stripe. He's a sharp engineer and an even stronger leader, and a close friend. I've known our other co-founder, Vivek, for a decade since we met in London, and he joined my team at Uber. Relentless, the ultimate connector, and someone I always want in the trenches with me. Together, we've assembled engineers who are the perfect fit for what we're building: people who've spent their careers on money movement and scale at Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon. Sarah Elliott joins as our GC, bringing regulatory depth from her time at the OCC and board experience at Anchorage Trust, and early-stage company experience at OnePay and Blend.
Beyond the resumes, what I cared about most was finding people who do things the right way. People who move fast without cutting corners, have high integrity, and believe in our mission to unlock the global economy for every business. I've seen what it costs when culture is an afterthought. We're building something different.
Our Investors
We were thrilled that NEA led our $8M seed round, with Rick Yang, one of the Valley's most tenured fintech investors, and my former Uber colleague Ann Bordetsky backing us from day one. We're also fortunate to have many strategic investors, including Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Solana Foundation, Bitso, Lightspeed Faction, Reflexive, OrangeDao, Alchemy, TrueX, Bits of Gold, and Stanford Business School, as well as several strategic angels across our industry.
Ready to move money globally? Contact us to get started.
Interested in joining us? We’re hiring. Come build with us at latitude.xyz/careers.
