Flex raises $70M to bring stablecoin private banking to UK

Flex's Series B1 doubles its valuation to $1.2B as stablecoin rails reshape cross-border private banking for global middle-market owners.

By Disrupts Editorial Team Mon, 3 August 2026

A modern open-plan office with curved white desks, gray office chairs, and potted green plants, facing a large black multi-screen display wall, all brightly lit by natural light from large windows.

Flex, the San Francisco-based private banking platform for high-net-worth business owners, has raised $70 million in a Series B1 round led by Halo Fund, the investment vehicle co-founded by Qualtrics founder Ryan Smith and Accel general partner Ryan Sweeney. The raise values Flex at $1.2 billion, more than double its December 2025 valuation, and coincides with the platform's formal UK launch and the debut of Flex Global, its stablecoin-powered cross-border banking product.

The round follows a $60 million Series B just six months ago. Combined with $300 million in debt financing, Flex has now deployed $480 million in total capital. Since December, annualised revenue has reportedly tripled to a nine-figure run rate, and total annualised payment volume has crossed $10 billion. The company says it will double headcount from 110 to more than 200 employees by year-end.

Invisible rails, visible ambition

The product thesis at Flex Global is straightforward but structurally significant: stablecoin settlement infrastructure, which has moved from regulatory pilot to production scale over the past 18 months, can make cross-border payments for business owners as frictionless as domestic ones. Flex embeds stablecoin rails underneath a conventional private-banking interface. Customers never manage a wallet; a payment to a supplier in Warsaw or Mexico City settles in minutes rather than days, priced in whichever of 32 supported currencies the counterparty prefers.

Flex CEO and founder Zaid Rahman frames the addressable gap bluntly: "Middle-market business owners are one of the most important and underserved customers in finance globally. Depending on the type of owner, they'll tell you their vendors are spread across the US, Poland, Brazil, etc; their accounts hold currency outside of just USD; and they have to oscillate across 2-3 vendors and layers of fees just to do business outside their country."

The release cites roughly 3 million high-net-worth business owners globally as the target cohort, and claims that in the US alone, approximately 350,000 such owners contribute to 40% of private-sector payroll. Both figures are company-issued and unverified, but the structural point is credible: incumbent private banks and B2B fintech platforms were built around either the business entity or the individual, not both simultaneously.

The convergence angle: stablecoins meet private credit

For Disrupts readers allocating capital across infrastructure, financial services and emerging-market plays, Flex sits at an intersection that is becoming increasingly contested. The maturation of enterprise stablecoin settlement (Visa's stablecoin settlement volume has reportedly reached a multibillion-dollar annualised run rate) is removing the primary friction that kept cross-border private banking expensive and slow. That infrastructure shift is now enabling a new category of platform: one that bundles private credit underwriting, multi-currency treasury management, agentic finance AI, and personal financial planning under a single relationship for owners who are, by default, multi-entity and multi-jurisdiction.

Halo Fund's involvement adds a less obvious distribution angle. Ryan Smith's ownership of the Utah Jazz, Utah Mammoth and stakes in Formula 1 gives Halo portfolio companies audience access inside sports and entertainment communities that skew toward exactly the affluent entrepreneurial demographic Flex is targeting. It is an unconventional go-to-market for a fintech platform, and a signal that private banking acquisition costs through traditional financial-services channels may be compelling enough to warrant creative alternatives.

The UK launch intensifies competition in a market where Revolut Business, Airwallex and Wise Platform have already staked positions on the multi-currency business banking layer, though none occupies the explicit private-bank positioning for high-net-worth owners that Flex is claiming. The broader question for investors is whether stablecoin-native infrastructure, now that it is legislatively cleared in both the US and Europe, creates durable moats or simply lowers the floor for every challenger in the space. Flex's bet is that the relationship layer, rather than the rails themselves, is where defensibility is built.