The finer details of back-end payment systems are enough to make most people’s eyes glaze over, even those in crypto. But Alex Fine, the founder and CEO of the startup Fun, finds in-the-weeds payment tasks to be just that, and his enthusiasm has paid off. On Friday, Fun announced that it has raised $72 million to work with buzzy tech firms like Polymarket to let users deposit and withdraw funds in crypto and fiat, like the U.S. dollar.
The crypto investor Multicoin Capital and the tech venture firm SignalFire led the Series A fundraise, which closed in late January. Other investors included Infinity Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, and Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen. Fine declined to disclose at what valuation he raised the capital. The Series A followed a previously unannounced $3.9 million seed round raised in 2022.
“If you have a money app, a finance app, how do you actually get the money in and out?” Fine said in an interview. “That’s what we do really well.”
Serious work
Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Stripe, and Shopify have all added crypto payments to their platforms amid a regulatory about-face under President Donald Trump’s administration. Fun anticipates that more non-crypto companies will join their ranks. This has spurred the company to build a business around letting users on these platforms go between digital assets and fiat currency—without the need to use a crypto exchange or bank. (Fun uses third-party providers to go between different tokens and currencies.)
The 26-year-old Fine dropped out of Stanford University in 2020 and spent two years workshopping several startup ideas. He eventually decided that blockchains will supplant the financial databases and filing cabinets of the past. “If you think about where value lives, where value is held, there’s many, many, many trillions of assets that all live in databases or live on paper today, and over the next 20 years, we’ll see all of those assets move,” he said.
So, in 2022, Fine founded Fun, a name he chose because he thought it was “iconoclastic”—and because he already owned the fun.xyz website domain as well as the @fun handle on X. “Everyone remembers the name,” he said.
Fun’s business is serious. The startup works directly with a company’s engineers to create the rails for users to put money into and out of platforms. It processes more than $18 billion in yearly payments volume and built the deposit infrastructure for not only the prediction market Polymarket but also the crypto derivatives platform Lighter as well as the lending app Aave.
“As fintechs and other neobanks around the world start to adopt tokens and stablecoins, I think Fun is actually pretty well-positioned to basically provide the same service that they provide to Polymarket and Lighter and Aave to those non-crypto native companies over time,” said Spencer Applebaum, a general partner at Multicoin.
Fun has more than 20 clients, Fine said, declining to specify his company’s revenue or whether his startup is profitable. And he plans to use the $72 million his company has raised up to add to his startup’s staff of almost 30 employees.
“We really want to be the front door for this new economy,” Fine said.
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