Back-to-back venture capital rounds raising $119 million in a matter of months have made Fasset, a stablecoin-focused Islamic digital bank, Los Angeles’ newest unicorn.
Founded in 2019 and dually headquartered in L.A. and Dubai, the bank rose to a $1 billion valuation thanks to two late-stage funding rounds led by Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Group this year.
A $68 million series C round followed a $51 million raise in May, with capital aimed at growing Fasset’s artificial intelligence-powered platform that lets individuals and businesses send, receive, hold and invest money across currencies.
Shortly after its first investment, SBI expressed interest in leading a larger round and deepening its relationship with the bank, said Mohammad Raafi Hossain, Fasset’s chief executive and co-founder.
“When a partner with that scale and that reach wants to move fast, you don’t sit on it for a fundraising calendar,” Raafi Hossain said in an emailed statement to the Business Journal. “Raising again quickly lets us match the size of the opportunity in front of us – deeper regulatory licensing in emerging markets and heavier investment in agentic AI – rather than waiting a year to raise it more expensively, or more dilutively.”
Stablecoin infrastructure
One of the Fasset’s main advertised draws are faster, cheaper transactions between any two people, assets or rails compared to conventional payment systems. Stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency whose value isn’t pegged to another asset, like the U.S. dollar, is part of the platform’s settlement infrastructure.
The digital bank’s three-comma valuation is buoyed by strong performance in recent years as stablecoin infrastructure regulation crops up, including through the U.S.’ Genius Act. Fasset grew its revenue sixfold and stayed profitable over the last 12 months, reporting an annualized transaction volume of more than $40 billion. A PitchBook Data Inc. analysis is optimistic on the bank’s odds of a successful exit, pegging its chance of pursuing an initial public offering at 64%.
The SBI-led capital injection brings Fasset’s total raised to-date to $151 million. The bank says it’ll use the funding to enter more markets, secure additional regulatory licenses and strengthen its cross-border payment network.
“The most obvious lever is distribution we couldn’t have built ourselves in this timeframe,” Raafi Hossain said. “Through SBI Remit, we get access to a network that already supports bank-account remittances to approximately 200 countries. That’s infrastructure and corridor-by-corridor negotiation that would otherwise take us years to build.”
