Tempo, a blockchain that is focused on stablecoin payment processing, recently announced a $500 million funding round. Incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, Tempo’s Series A round was reportedly led by Thrive Capital and Greenoaks. This, according to an update this past week from Fortune, which cited sources claiming to be familiar with the matter.
The latest funding round now values Tempo at around $5 billion and includes contributions from Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel. As clarified in the update, Stripe and Paradigm did not contribute to the investment round.
As explained in the announcement, Tempo is meant to serve as an Ethereum-compatible L1 that is said to be optimized for high-throughput payments as well as settlement. The network is reportedly working with companies like OpenAI, Shopify, Visa, Anthropic, and Deutsche Bank (as noted previously by Stripe Chief Executive Officer Patrick Collison).
Collison has said that Tempo is the payments-focused L1, which has been optimized for real-world financial-services apps (as explained when the initiative was first introduced in September). Notably, Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang, who currently has a seat on Fintech Stripe’s board, is said to be spearheading the initiative.
The latest investment round adds further positive momentum to Stripe’s crypto strategy. The Fintech company has been sharply focused on increasing its exposure via acquisitions like Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company acquired for $1.1 billion, and Privy, a cryptocurrency wallet service that was acquired back in June of this year.
Financial infrastructure Fintech Stripe has also completed the integration of Coinbase’s Base L2 network into its cryptocurrency payments suite. Now, this latest funding round comes after the announcement that the Ethereum Foundation research expert Dankrad Feist has joined Tempo as a senior engineer.
Feist has noted that the initiative follows Ethereum’s “permissionless ideals” and is meant to support the next wave of on-chain financial services.