Payy Pulls a Vanish: $6M Seed to Ghost USDC Payments on ZK Rollup

Payy, a stablecoin startup operating out of New York, secured a cool $6 million seed round back in December 2025. The raise was spearheaded by FirstMark Capital, bumping the company's total war chest to $8 million. The deal was a SAFE with token warrants, a classic combo plate for the space, with Robot Ventures and DBA Crypto also chipping in.

The fresh capital is earmarked for building a payments network where privacy isn't an afterthought—it's the whole point, powered by zero-knowledge proofs. Payy's thesis is that the ledger's brutal honesty is a non-starter for corporate adoption; as CEO Sid Gandhi put it to The Block, sending a stablecoin payment today is basically "like posting your bank statement on a public website." A move only a true degen would make for clout.

The project began life as Polybase, a web3 database play, before executing a classic crypto pivot in 2023. The team realized their ZK tech could patch a glaring hole in the stablecoin stack. Their current offerings include a self-custodial wallet (launched January 2024) and a Visa card (live since August 2025), letting users spend USDC anywhere Visa is accepted while their on-chain activity stays off the grid—finally, a card where your transaction history isn't fodder for a blockchain analyst's PowerPoint.

Looking further down the road, the grand plan is the Payy Network, an Ethereum Layer-2 rollup that uses ZK magic to obscure the sender, receiver, and amount. Think of it as a privacy curtain for your money. A testnet is scheduled to drop next month, with a mainnet launch penciled in for this summer. A native token is also on the drawing board, though the team is keeping the timeline closer to their chest than a seed phrase.

Already, the startup boasts over 100,000 users scattered across 120 countries and is processing roughly $130 million in annualized transaction volume. With a lean team of 12, Payy is on a hiring spree for biz dev and engineering brains. Revenue flows in from on-ramping fees, gas fees, and enterprise contracts—the usual suspects for a infrastructure play.

A dozen design partners are already tinkering on the testnet, aiming to add a layer of discretion to "billions of dollars of stablecoin flows." The FirstMark investment isn't just cash; it's a corporate rolodex, opening doors to tech-forward enterprises for future onboarding. Payy rides a growing wave of stablecoin infrastructure ventures sucking up institutional capital, joining outfits like Gnosis, which recently entered the U.S. market via a partnership with stablecoin startup Noah after its own $22 million seed round. The race to hide your money properly is officially on.