Exclusive: Startup Fun raises $72 million for the serious business of converting crypto and cash

The finer details of back-end payment systems are enough to make most people’s eyes glaze over, even those in crypto. But Alex Fine, the founder and CEO of the startup Fun, finds in-the-weeds payment tasks to be just that, and his enthusiasm has paid off. On Friday, Fun announced that it has raised $72 million to work with buzzy tech firms like Polymarket to let users deposit and withdraw funds in crypto and fiat, like the U.S. dollar. The crypto investor Multicoin Capital and the tech venture firm SignalFire led the Series A fundraise, which closed in late January. Other investors included Infinity Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, and Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen. Fine declined to disclose at what valuation he raised the capital. The Series A followed a previously unannounced $3.9 million seed round raised in 2022. “If you have a money app, a finance app, how do you actually get the money in and out?” Fine said in an interview. “That’s what we do really well.” Serious work Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Stripe, and Shopify have all added crypto payments to their platforms amid a regulatory about-face under President Donald Trump’s administration. Fun anticipates that more non-crypto companies will join their ranks. This has spurred the company to build a business around letting users on these platforms go between digital assets and fiat currency—without the need to use a crypto exchange or bank. (Fun uses third-party providers to go between different tokens and currencies.) The 26-year-old Fine dropped out of Stanford University in 2020 and spent two years workshopping several startup ideas. He eventually decided that blockchains will supplant the financial databases and filing cabinets of the past. “If you think about where value lives, where value is held, there’s many, many, many trillions of assets that all live in databases or live on paper today, and over the next 20 years, we’ll see all of those assets move,” he said. So, in 2022, Fin