Payy raises $6m seed to build private stablecoin payments on zero-knowledge rails

Payy raised $6m led by FirstMark to build a zero-knowledge L2 and wallet that make USDC payments private by default, targeting enterprise stablecoin flows that avoid fully transparent chains.

Payy, a stablecoin startup building a privacy-focused payments network on zero-knowledge infrastructure, has raised $6 million in seed funding led by FirstMark Capital — an early backer of Airbnb, Shopify, and Pinterest — with participation from Robot Ventures and DBA Crypto, the company announced Wednesday. According to The Block, the round closed in December 2025 and was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with attached token warrants, bringing Payy’s total capital raised to $8 million including a $2 million pre-seed raised under its former identity as Polybase.

“We were preempted by FirstMark,” Payy co-founder and CEO Sid Gandhi told The Block. The company’s core argument is one that a growing chorus of stablecoin builders are raising — that on-chain payments are too transparent to attract serious enterprise volume. “Today, sending a stablecoin payment is like posting your bank statement on a public website,” Gandhi said. “Every amount, every recipient, every balance, visible to anyone. Enterprises will never move meaningful payment flows onchain if every transaction is visible to the world.” A previous crypto.news opinion made a similar case, arguing that if stablecoins aren’t private, nothing is.

Payy was originally founded as Polybase, a web3 database project, before pivoting toward stablecoin payments in 2023. Gandhi said the pivot came from realizing that zero-knowledge technology built for the database could plug what he sees as a structural gap in the stablecoin stack. The company now offers a self-custodial wallet — launched in January 2024 — and a Visa card that went live in August 2025, allowing users to spend USDC anywhere Visa is accepted while keeping on-chain transactions private.

Payy’s longer-term infrastructure play is the Payy Network, an Ethereum Layer 2 rollup using zero-knowledge proofs to shield transaction details including sender, receiver, and amounts. The company announced the network last month. A testnet is expected to launch next month, with a mainnet rollout planned for this summer. A native token is also in the pipeline, though Gandhi declined to set a timeline. A previous crypto.news story on USDCx highlighted how Aleo’s zero-knowledge infrastructure is pursuing a near-identical thesis — private stablecoin transfers with selective regulatory disclosure — suggesting the market for this architecture is becoming genuinely competitive.

Payy is based in New York and has a team of 12, with plans to hire across business development and engineering. The platform currently serves more than 100,000 users across 120 countries, processing roughly $130 million in annualized transaction volume. The company generates revenue through onramping fees, gas fees, and enterprise contracts.

Gandhi said a dozen design partners are already building on the testnet to add privacy to “billions of dollars of stablecoin flows,” and framed the FirstMark relationship as a direct channel into enterprise distribution. “With the FirstMark investment, we have access to some of the best technology-forward companies on the planet, who we plan to onboard to stablecoins in the coming months,” he said. Payy now joins a broader wave of stablecoin infrastructure startups attracting institutional capital, including Gnosis, which entered U.S. markets through a partnership with stablecoin startup Noah after the latter raised $22 million in seed funding.