Huma, a Payment Financing (PayFi) network, announced that it has raised $38 million in funding.
Distributed Global led the equity round, with “significant participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, the Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures, CVC arm of İşbank, the largest private bank in Turkiye.”
Part of this funding round came as investments “into high-yield real-world assets (RWA) assets on the platform.”
The vast majority of businesses and people “around the world depend on a form of payment financing. Credit cards alone finance $16T in merchant payments globally.”
Trade finance facilitates $10 trillion in B2B payments.
One in every six families depends “on remittances—money sent back home across the borders—yet even that system depends on trillions of dollars being locked in pre-funding accounts. The list goes on.”
While the demand for payment financing increases daily, “creating an urgent need for more innovative solutions, traditional financial institutions are unable—or unwilling—to meet this need, widening the liquidity gap with each passing day.”
Payment financing is so ingrained in “every part of our lives that, without it, the entire economy would stop growing.”
PayFi aims to address this giant liquidity gap “by bringing trillions of dollars of real world payment volume over to blockchains and stablecoins.”
Leveraging the core strengths of blockchain—global money movement in seconds through programmable money—PayFi also enables “new real-world use-cases that were previously impossible.”
Huma has built the first ever PayFi network with “all of these use cases in mind, adopting an open, modular and decentralized approach to empower interoperable solutions across participants.”
By bringing the best of RWA, Payments, and DeFi together, Huma is “creating a network that is far more efficient and accessible than traditional alternatives.”
Building on this vision, Huma’s April merger “with Arf, the leading on-demand liquidity solution for global payments, brought together the two of the most prominent PayFi players.”
Huma and Arf have already surpassed $1.8 billion “in payment financing transactions and are on track to reach $10 billion next year, making them one of the fastest growing use cases for Circle’s USDC.”
Part of this raise came as investments “into Arf’s high-yield RWA assets.”
The Stellar Development Foundation “provided a $10 million investment. Additionally, tokenized assets are currently available to accredited investors on Scroll for a limited period.”
With this funding infusion, Huma plans to further “expand its PayFi network to the Stellar smart contract platform and to Solana in the coming months, making sure the network is accessible from all the major payments-focused chains.”
Huma’s growing PayFi network has caught the “attention of leading blockchain advocates, further fueling the momentum behind PayFi.”
The Solana Foundation’s support signals “how PayFi’s innovative on-chain financial solutions are set to redefine global finance.”
Huma plans to launch the Huma Foundation this year, “a pivotal move to decentralize its PayFi network and broaden global access, further solidifying its leadership in the RWA space.”
