Rain raises $58M Series B to power stablecoin-based card issuing and global payments on Visa rails

We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Bye. Get that mallet ready, Jordy. We have some news coming into the TVP and Ultradome from the Reream waiting room. We have Rain. Welcome to the stream. How you guys doing? Welcome. Give us the update. Introduce yourselves. Tell us what you do. Tell us the news.

Give us a big number, please. Hey, we're uh co-founders. I'm Farooq. I'm Charles. And uh yeah, we're building stable coin infrastructure. We just raised a $58 million series B. Let's go. First proper hit of the day. Uh what was it? 52 58. How much money? 58. 58. 58.

And and and and that 58 million, it's still worth 58 million, right? Because you're keeping the stable coins. Exactly. Did you already whip it into World Liberty Financial? Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Um Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh just uh I'd love to just better better understand the business.

Uh kind of go a little bit below the surface. What What are you guys uh doing? Uh what kind of customers are you working with? All that good stuff. Yeah, I mean we power a lot of like global payments use cases powered by stable coins largely on top of the Visa network.

We are a stable coinbased card issuing platform as well as a stable coinbased payments institution. So we connect any use case with any sort of payout mechanism around the world. Anybody can embed stable coins into their app and just rip it. You know, you can give us dollars to everybody around the world.

Let's give it up for just ripping it. That's right. Some of our customers include New Payment Pro payment acquirer, Avalanche. So, we part of the Avalanche card. We power a lot of dollar access cards in Latin America and emerging markets. Got it.

Yeah, I was going to ask so like is is a lot of the business international at this point? Uh only about like 50% of the business is international. We power a lot of US use cases where consumers are dealing with stable coins, but it feels and looks like a regular credit card or debit card product.

And so it's not just global, it's everything. I mean, our thinking is is let's just upgrade the infrastructure in the back and then the consumers and the users can feel whatever they want to feel with whatever they already have. Yeah.

What what what are the tangible benefits for the American consumer who might be using just normal Visa network card? does if you're if you're using stablecoin as the backing is that going around the Visa network entirely or are you still plugging into the Visa network at some point?

We're still plugging into the Visa network, but I'll give you an example, right? Like Rain is the only company that settles seven days a week with the payment network uh using stable coins that lets us have significant savings in terms of collateral that our customers need to post. Got it.

So the end user advantage is not necessarily to the end card holder. Y it's our partner that's operating the program. So you can launch faster, you can service more people, you can be more flexible, you can operate cheap more cheaply, you can make more money.

And so for us, it's really about driving cost down, driving revenue up for our customers and using stable coins to do that. That typical like four days of collateral or long weekend risk and we're able to bring that down to less than a days of collateral. Yeah.

So, it is the long term that uh you might see someone try and compete with like those popular credit cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Amx Platinum or something and they're able to pass through more savings because they're saving more so they acquire more customers that way and there's this flywheel there.

Is that is that how we might see something like this actually go really big in America? You can already see things like this happening in the US. Like we have a number of customers that are paying like 3% cash back and they're competing head-to-head with some of these programs.

And for us, it's really about, you know, being the partner that you can scale with. Yeah. At a significant cost savings and so our customers are able to just move a lot quicker. Yeah. If people get the Ether card in between power, they have really competitive rewards at their offer. Nice.

Uh you guys start, correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys started in like 2021. Is that is that right? Yeah, we were actually so we initially built uh this product called sign and wire which was a little bit competitive with party rap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's that's what I was getting at because I obviously you guys have evolved a ton but I remember I remember those days. Yeah.

Um, and we we had we had stable coin we had stable coin functionality in our product, but we just after the uh what I was going to ask you about is like navigating kind of the FTX kind of crisis because at that point we had to basically completely uh jettison uh or or or remove a lot of the stable coin functionality that we had because at that point every major financial institution was just saying like look risk off risk off.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, look, we were lucky to find a way through that without having to, you know, cut down on all the stable coin stuff. And it was actually a blessing for us because we were able to build in relative obscurity. Yeah.

All the technology that we now take for granted and be able to use that with volume and multiple years of history that now like large enterprises come to us and they're like, "Wow, you've been doing this for several years and you know, anybody starting today is going to have to start today.

" Whereas with us, we've started several years ago and you get a battle tested solution which has been our advantage in the market. Yep. What do you guys uh obviously we have new stable coin regulations. What are you guys expecting from the market broadly over the next call it 6 to 12 months?

It's it looks like it's a lot of people are going to explore what stable coins mean for their business and for their bank or for their app. And I think that that's all very good, right? I mean, our hot take is that it's probably going to look like when people started issuing like, you know, gift cards. Yeah.

That you can buy at, you know, CVS where, you know, I can get a Red Lobster gift card and all these other things. But if you can't use it anywhere else, is it really money? Yeah. I think that's what people are going to run into. And a lot of folks come to us when they launch a stable coin and they're like, "Oh, wait.

Like, I can't use this anywhere.

like what if there was a partner that lets me and my customers use this in more places and so that's where we come in right we we just started partner we just partnered with the state of Wyoming where on the first day of launching their frontier token it was accessible uh and usable on the rain infrastructure anywhere that Visa's accepted globally so just from Wyoming we were able to take it to the world without them having to do anything that's wild uh is every state going to launch a uh token or or do you think they're an anomaly?

Some states will probably launch tokens. I think other states are still probably figuring out why they're anti all this stuff. Yeah, I think what is the rationale for for an individual state not launching an a token that's tied to the economic prosperity of that specific state, but just backed by USD?

like that seems extremely redundant and and I could not wrap my mind around the benefit of that. I mean, a lot of these states like in Wyoming for example, they see this as an opportunity to build a statebacked token where a consumer around the world knows that, hey, this is supported by a government institution.

It's going to be onetoone. They're not having to take the risk on a private market issuer that could have a run on the bank. And so there's a potential market for there to be, hey, you know, this is a public sector token.

It's more trustworthy because it's issued by a regulated by by actual So is that just like a runaround the no central bank digital currencies like vibe that we're getting out of DC?

I think that there are going to be a lot of different types of experiments on how do we get around this like no central bank digital currency thing. Like ultimately if you look at the dollar, if you go back far back enough, most of them were just issued by public like private banks, right?

Dollar dollars were issued by like your local community bank and then eventually they were issued by the federal government.

And we're probably going to have se several countries where it's going to be issued by your local private bank and or your state and other places where it's going to be issued by the central bank and maybe other places where it's going to be just issued by your corner store or Walmart or Amazon.

And I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what the next few years looks like cuz it we're going to see this like Cambrian explosion of whatever people want to do.

And that creates an opportunity for you guys to just be in the back end swapping in and out of all these random stable coins that each represent a dollar but have varying levels of liquidity. And yeah, is that is that right? I mean, you don't know like if you have cash in your pocket.

I mean, I don't, but you may, but most of the bills in your pocket are issued by or, you know, they have a different Federal Reserve on them. Like, do you know, do you care? Sure. Like, is it Denver Federal Reserve? Is it the Kansas City one? Like, which one is it?

Um, so we really built our infrastructure to be agnostic of whatever stable coin is people want to use. You know, people want to spend them. Um, and we have direct relationship with these issuers and we're just providing that utility layer for them. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, last question.

Uh, Aaron Frank told me to ask you, you've already given some hot takes, but he said to ask for some hat takes. He said you're very opinionated on hacks on on on hats. Farooq, anything there or is he just messing with me? No.

Look, I'm a big deep hat guy, so like I think your hat looks very nice cuz it looks like a nice deep hat. Charles is more of a dad hat guy. Never dad hat. Never dad hat. I didn't know I didn't know that. I didn't know the the terminology for it, but dad hats are over. We'll have this your address. I need some rain hats.

We'll do it. We'll do it. Um, awesome guys. Well, congratulations uh in you. You uh started the company at the right time and uh it's awesome to see the progress. Cool. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats on the round. Cheers. Talk to you soon. How'd you sleep?

We talked to so many incredible entrepreneurs building so many incredible things and yet we still need to solve the internet crisis. There's a global internet crisis um and 84 last night but I think this doesn't count some of the sleep I got. What'd you get? I got a uh so I this is this is crazy. Went to bed at 8:32.

8:30 Woke up at 5:30. Okay. but only got six hours of sleep because middle three-year-old was going the whole house was going crazy. I walked uh I got up this morning and my my What was the final score? 62. Oh, play the sound effect for me. Let's go. I w I woke up this morning one zero this week. Let's see.

It's a short week. See what I can do. I get up uh get up at 5:30, walk out of my room. Three-year-old walks out of his room holding sandwich. That's hilarious.

holding uh where does where he had got at some point got up in the night and just grabbed a sandwich from the fridge that he There is a certain moment where the kids be they like stop being like babies and they start just being like roommates and you're like oh like you're just like dude in the fridge bro like did you ask did you ask if you could eat my sandwich?

It was his sandwich to his credit. We got we got a takeout yesterday. But but still I was like, "Dude, it's 500 am. Why why are you session is nine10 of the law, Jordan? " Yeah, it is. Um anyway,. com get a pod five night free risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

Um, so apparently uh the judge issued a sealed decision in the Google case trying to figure out uh what uh any more details. Oh yes, we got we finally got the Google result. Um but we don't know exactly what it is. I don't know.

Um in other news, Benny Safy collapses into tears during the 15minute standing ovation for the smashing machine. Do people realize if The Rock wins the Oscar, he's going to run for president? 41,000 likes. I think people want The Rock to run. That would be great. What do you think? You think The Rock could pull it off?

Did you see his new slim down look? He lost some weight. He's not He's not wearing Do you think he's just getting ready for mass the mask a mass gain run? Yeah. I mean, bulking season is coming clearly. Yeah. I mean, it's hard because he's he is he is getting older.

It seems like it's probably a more healthy decision to to take off some of the weight and not walk around. But uh I'm excited. I know you won't be seeing this movie because you never see any movies, but I will be checking out the smashing the smashing machine. Looks pretty good.

So anyways, can't figure out what's happening with Google yet, but the stock is up in after hours trading. So guess it likes it. This is uh this is a good one. So uh there there's an interview with the the CEO of Chevron in the New York Times and uh there's a quote here. So, what are you trying to learn about right now?

asks the interviewer. And the CEO of Chevron says artificial intelligence. Says, "What's the last thing you asked AI? " He says, "My last question was about was the biggest was about what was the biggest merger in the United States last year. " And uh they say, "What was it? " I said, "Our acquisition of Hess.

" So, this is the power of the power of artificial intelligence. priceless going just going to AI you're the CEO just asking about your own activities