Mesta: The Global FIAT+Stablecoin payment network
Our investment in Mesta
Today we’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Sandeep Pyapali, Kiran Polavarapu, Nitin Shrivastava, and the entire Mesta team as they redefine global payment networks with their hybrid fiat-stablecoin payment platform.
The Cross-Border Payments Challenge
Cross-border payments, a $44 trillion market, remain plagued by inefficiencies. Traditional systems are slow, with transactions settling in 2-3 business days. Moving money overseas is costly, with businesses averaging 5% in fees. Companies face further complications from the lack of interoperability between banking systems across countries, making it difficult to track payments and know exactly where money is at any given moment.
Making matters worse, the complexity of building payment infrastructure is staggering. There isn't a universal API to enable businesses to easily transact worldwide. Ask any payments expert who knows how the sausage is made, and they will likely admit that the back-end infrastructure for global transactions is held together with duct tape and bubblegum—a patchwork of tools, providers, and systems that fail more often than desired and desperately need an update.
A Next-Generation Payment Platform
Mesta is solving these challenges by combining traditional payment systems with blockchain-based stablecoin rails to enable faster, cheaper, and more reliable cross-border payments.
The company is building a unified, API-driven payment network that blends real-time fiat settlement with blockchain technology. The platform offers instant global payments, end-to-end tracking, and significant cost reduction. By combining traditional and blockchain-based payment rails, Mesta enables all customers to benefit, not just those that are crypto-native. The Mesta Payment Network accepts both FIAT and Stablecoins as sources of funds, while maintaining full compliance and transaction transparency across multiple jurisdictions.
Today, Mesta allows customers to move money across 50+ currencies and 100+ countries. Thanks to Mesta's APIs, customers can process cross-border payments for bill pay, payroll, supply chain payments, and global remittance at the speed of thought. Companies have launched on Mesta in as little as a week! Since launching in beta a few months ago, Mesta has already processed $12 million in Total Payment Volume (TPV), highlighting the platform's quality and the team's incessant focus on building a product that just works.
Built to Solve Their Own Problem
We strongly believe that tackling a big, complex infrastructure problem—particularly in money movement—requires a special team with deep domain understanding to build it the right way. That's why we're believe Sandeep, Kiran, and Nitin are the team to tackle this opportunity.
Sandeep lives and breathes payments, having spent 15 years in the industry at BILL, PayPal, and most recently Uber, where he led the core payment platform and helped scale from $20B to $100B in volume across 70 countries. It was at Uber, while coordinating money movement between riders, drivers, and HQ across multiple continents, that he recognized the inadequacies of existing infrastructure. This began a multi-year exploration of how to solve cross-border payments simply and elegantly. The team is strengthened by Kiran, who has built products serving tens of millions of users at both Salesforce and SLAC Accelerator Laboratory, and Nitin, who brings a decade of financial services and crypto experience from PayPal, Mastercard, and OKX. Together, they possess the domain expertise, connections, and understanding of technology at scale required to succeed in this ecosystem.
In a rapidly evolving market, Mesta is setting a new standard for cross-border payments. We're proud to have led Mesta's $2M pre-seed round, investing alongside our friends Anand at Canonical, Scott and Jenny at Everywhere, and Kevin at Inventum Ventures. It’s the beginning of the Mesta journey and we’re excited to be along for the ride!
For more on Mesta check out the company’s blog post, press release, and visit their website at mesta.xyz
Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund, leading a founder's initial round of financing as their first true believer. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.