Squads raises $18M to help businesses ditch bank accounts for stablecoin-native financial operations

Squads raises $18M to go bank-account-free on Solana

Squads is building stablecoin infrastructure for businesses that want to run treasury and financial operations without a traditional bank account. The $18M round was led by Solana Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Placeholder, and Horn Ventures also participating. The capital is primarily earmarked for Altitude, Squads' stablecoin business banking product.

Stepan Simkin frames the core pitch simply: programmable blockchains are now reliable enough, stablecoins are mature enough (market cap north of $300B), and the orchestration layer connecting crypto rails to fiat has finally arrived. Companies like Bridge, acquired by Stripe, sit in the middle, converting stablecoins to fiat wherever needed. That last piece was the missing link.

“Our thesis with our new product Altitude is really that you don't need a bank account anymore. You essentially can rely on programmable blockchains, stablecoins, and wallets to run your entire financial operations... We raised 18,000,000. Solana Ventures led the round. Today, we secure about 10,000,000,000 in assets.”

From infrastructure to Altitude

Squads didn't start as a banking product. For its first four years, it built programmable multi-sig wallets on Solana, accumulating $10B in assets under custody. That infrastructure work gave it an early read on how crypto-native organizations were actually using stablecoins for day-to-day financial operations, and Altitude is the direct product of that observation.

The target customer today is the 10-to-50 person startup or SMB. Simkin says the onboarding experience is deliberately designed to feel like opening a traditional business account, with stablecoin infrastructure running underneath.

What the stack can and can't do

Payroll and corporate cards are functional today. Stablecoin-backed cards let businesses spend directly from a stablecoin balance, and many payroll providers like Rippling and Deel now accept stablecoin top-ups directly, avoiding fiat conversion entirely. ACH pull remains a work in progress — settling stablecoins on one end against fiat on the other is still being worked through with infrastructure partners.

Security model

Squads runs a layered smart account system on Solana. Each business member gets an individual programmable account with granular controls and MFA; the business account itself is a programmable object on-chain. Simkin's argument against the FDIC comparison is blunt: FDIC insurance exists precisely because fractional reserve banking means your money isn't actually there. On-chain, the rules governing asset security are expressed in math and code and are publicly verifiable.

Agentic layer

Simkin sees the fully programmable stack — settlement, accounts, and money itself — as a natural foundation for agentic automation. The long-term direction is reducing how much a business needs to actively manage, with end-to-end automations handling financial operations over time. That's still forward-looking rather than a shipped product feature.

Takeaway: Squads enters the Altitude push with $10B in custody, a credible infrastructure pedigree, and a stablecoin ecosystem that has closed most of its fiat-connectivity gaps. The remaining friction — ACH pull, vendor stablecoin adoption — is real but narrowing.