Atum, a San Francisco startup building what it calls the first open payments network for moving money worldwide, has come out of stealth with $13.5 million in new capital. The company was founded by Pete Cooling, who previously led Visa’s crypto product team and spent years working on blockchain-based payment systems.
The round includes backing from Variant, PayPal Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Road Capital, Mirana Ventures, First Commit, Credibly Neutral, and strategic advisor Charlie Songhurst.
Atum says the funds will help it scale a coordination layer that links payment firms, developers, and enterprises without issuing its own currency, running a blockchain, privileging any particular payment rail, or taking custody of customer funds.
Cooling frames the problem as fragmentation.
Money today moves across currencies, blockchains, apps, and local rails that do not talk to one another.
Each handoff adds cost, delay, and operational friction.
Stablecoins have made some global transfers faster and cheaper, but they sit on many different chains, leaving users and businesses to manage that complexity themselves.
Atum positions itself as the layer in the middle.
An integrator, developer, or application can submit a payment request.
Independent settlement providers then compete to complete the transfer on supported chains and stablecoins.
Senders specify what they will send; receivers get the asset and destination they requested.
The network also supports native authorization, reversible payments, and identity features.
Atum says it is paid only on volume and does not compete with the companies that use it.
That design, the company argues, keeps the network credibly neutral. It describes the product as an open-loop payments and commerce platform rather than a closed rail of its own.
Intended users include card issuers and acquirers, payment service providers, card networks, stablecoin orchestrators, wallets, fintechs, enterprises, and developers building on top of the network.
The company says it already supports both conventional stablecoin payments and agent-driven payments through protocols such as x402 and MPP, and that both people and software agents are completing transfers on the network today.
Cooling has called the project his life’s work.
He said he concluded as early as 2014 that blockchains were, at their core, payments networks, and that onchain accounts would eventually function like bank accounts.
In his view, new infrastructure is required to make money move more smoothly than it does now.
Before founding Atum, he represented Visa on the Linux Foundation’s OpenWallet effort, which worked on standards for digital wallets spanning identity, financial accounts, payment cards, and stablecoins.
The company is now inviting builders to apply at atum.xyz.
Its public materials emphasize that customers keep their own keys, policies, and customer relationships while Atum coordinates authorization, routing, delivery, and confirmation across supported rails.
Settlement operators compete on price and execution; Atum itself is not a counterparty and does not hold the funds.
That separation is the core of the pitch: one integration at the top, with competing providers handling movement below. Whether that model can reduce friction at scale will depend on how many rails, assets, and settlement providers join the marketplace as the company leaves stealth.