Nodu secures $1.45m to power regulated stablecoin payments

By Vriti Gothi

London-based stablecoin infrastructure startup Nodu has raised $1.45 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Digital Space Ventures, an early investor in Revolut and PaySend. The funding comes as stablecoin transaction volumes surge globally, now estimated at more than $10 trillion annually, intensifying pressure on banks and FinTechs to modernise cross-border payment rails.

Nodu is positioning itself as a European alternative to largely U.S.-centric stablecoin infrastructure providers such as Zerohash and Bridge. The company focuses on enabling banks, payment service providers, and FinTechs to integrate stablecoins into regulated financial workflows under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.

Despite rapid innovation in digital payments, cross-border transfers remain slow, costly, and operationally fragmented. Stablecoins have emerged as a potential solution, but adoption among regulated institutions has been constrained by compliance complexity, unclear regulatory treatment, and the technical burden of integrating blockchain-based systems into existing financial infrastructure.

Founded by Alex Novozhenov, Vladislav Nikolayev, and Daria Dubinina, Nodu was built in response to these challenges. The founders previously worked on Crassula, a Latvia-based FinTech platform that processed more than €600 billion in transaction volume for over 150 clients.

Nodu provides a ready-made compliance and payments framework that allows institutions to send, receive, and hold stablecoins without building proprietary infrastructure or acquiring new licenses. Its platform integrates fiat and blockchain rails into a single regulated flow, enabling reporting and compliance processes to run automatically in the background.

A key component of the offering is its stablecoin off-ramp infrastructure, which supports fiat payouts in more than 100 countries. This capability is aimed at reducing friction in cross-border payments and remittances, particularly for European institutions operating internationally.

“Day after day, we saw the same challenge,” says Alex Novozhenov, CEO and Co-Founder, Nodu. “Banks wanted to join the digital-asset economy, but lacked safe, compliant tools. Nodu was built to change that. With stablecoins, global payments should take seconds, not days and cost cents, not tens of dollars. Our mission is to make that infrastructure invisible, automatic, and globally accessible.”

The timing aligns with growing regulatory clarity in Europe. MiCA, which comes into effect in phases through 2024 and 2025, provides a unified regulatory framework for stablecoins and crypto-asset service providers across the EU. For banks facing margin pressure and increasing competition from FinTechs, compliant access to stablecoin-based payment rails is becoming a strategic consideration rather than an experimental one.