Rhythmic, a New York-based startup founded by former executives from American Express, Mastercard, and Walmart, has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Dragonfly Capital. Mirana Ventures and The Fintech Fund also participated in the round, along with other unnamed backers. The company did not disclose its valuation.
Reference: Linkedin
What Rhythmic Does
Rhythmic is building an embedded finance platform powered by stablecoin infrastructure. The company’s product allows consumer-facing brands to offer stored value accounts, payments, co-branded Visa cards, and rewards programs directly within their existing apps, while Rhythmic handles the underlying financial operations. Stablecoins serve as the back-end settlement and money-movement layer, but remain invisible to end users.
The startup targets medium and large consumer brands that want to introduce financial services without taking on the regulatory and operational burden of becoming financial institutions themselves. Rhythmic’s platform is modular: it currently spans accounts, card issuance, and rewards, with lending and buy-now-pay-later capabilities listed on its product roadmap.
CEO Aaron Marks told Fortune that the company plans to launch its product by midyear 2026. Rhythmic does not yet have revenue and, until recently, operated with just three employees. The company expects to grow to approximately six staff members by the end of February.
Founder Backgrounds
The two co-founders bring overlapping experience across traditional payments and crypto.
Marks spent more than five years at American Express, rising to a director-level role overseeing a $3.5 billion portfolio of healthcare, higher education, and construction clients. He subsequently joined Circle, the USDC stablecoin issuer, as an early enterprise hire focused on driving adoption among non-crypto-native businesses. More recently, he served as VP and General Manager of blockchain and digital asset products at Sentry Enterprises.
Joseph Hayes, who serves as chief product and technology officer, spent over eight years at Mastercard, where his work included standing up the company’s real-time payments consumer product organization following the Vocalink acquisition. He later led crypto and stablecoins product strategy at Walmart from 2022 to 2024, where he spearheaded a program to evaluate integrating stablecoin payments into Walmart’s commerce ecosystem. Before co-founding Rhythmic, Hayes served as chief product officer at Sleev, a stablecoin payments startup.
Both founders established Rhythmic in October 2025.
Investor Context
Dragonfly Capital, the round’s lead investor, closed its fourth fund at $650 million just two days before this announcement, on February 17, 2026. The fund explicitly targets stablecoin infrastructure, on-chain financial services, and tokenized real-world assets. The firm’s portfolio spans more than 160 companies over eight years, including Polymarket, Rain, Ethena, Avalanche, and MakerDAO. General partner Haseeb Qureshi has stated that the firm sees financial use cases as the dominant growth vector in crypto, declaring that “non-financial crypto has failed”.
Mirana Ventures is an early-stage crypto fund strategically aligned with the Bybit exchange ecosystem, investing in deals ranging from $200,000 to $20 million. The fund has published research on stablecoins as a fintech growth frontier and has previously backed stablecoin payment ventures, including a co-lead of Obita’s $10 million angel round in 2025.
The Fintech Fund is a solo general partner vehicle run by Nik Milanovic, author of the This Week in Fintech newsletter, writing checks of $100,000 to $500,000 into pre-seed and seed-stage fintech and DeFi companies.
Use of Funds
The new capital will fund Rhythmic’s immediate hiring push and its investment in compliance infrastructure, according to the Fortune report. The company did not detail specific product development milestones beyond its stated midyear launch target.
This $4 million seed round appears to be Rhythmic’s first institutional financing. The company was founded only four months ago, in October 2025.
Market Context
Rhythmic enters a stablecoin infrastructure funding environment that has grown increasingly active in early 2026. Comparable recent seed rounds include Levl’s $7 million raise led by Galaxy Ventures for stablecoin payment infrastructure, Superset’s $4 million round for cross-chain stablecoin liquidity, and Birch Hill’s $2.5 million pre-seed for on-chain credit infrastructure. Total stablecoin market capitalization currently exceeds $268 billion, and the broader stablecoin sector has attracted significant venture attention as firms seek to build the “plumbing” connecting blockchain settlement to traditional commerce.
Rhythmic plans to begin onboarding brand partners ahead of its midyear product launch. Whether the company can convert its payments-industry pedigree into commercial traction with consumer brands will determine its trajectory in an increasingly competitive embedded stablecoin finance market.
