Trace Finance

Trace Finance is a financial infrastructure company offering cross-border payments, foreign exchange, banking connectivity, compliance and stablecoin settlement through a single API. Its platform converts Brazilian reais to stablecoins in under a minute via PIX, supports BRL, USD and EUR accounts, and settles cross-border payments continuously, including weekends and holidays. Clients can integrate without establishing a local entity in Brazil.

The API exposes four core primitives: beneficiaries (payout destinations across PIX, bank accounts and crypto wallets), quotes (short-window locked FX rates bound to an account), operations (deposits, swaps and withdrawals) and signed webhooks for approvals and terminal states. A dashboard for balances, conversions, payouts and approvals, with export for auditors, is listed as forthcoming, alongside additional settlement products under development. Compliance is embedded in each operation through automated KYC, transaction monitoring and audit trails aligned to AML/CFT standards.

At its 2022 seed stage the company focused on helping Latin American, particularly Brazilian, startups move venture capital raised through US holding companies into local operations, automating onboarding and working with multiple banks on the backend to cut transfer spreads from about 4% to 0.2% and shorten a process that previously averaged around 1.5 months.

Founding story

Trace Finance was founded in early 2021 by Bernardo Brites, Rafael Luz and Leone Parise, a team with prior experience at crypto and fintech businesses including Binance, Trust Wallet and Decred. The company was created to address the slow and costly process Brazilian startups faced when moving venture capital from US-based holding companies into local operations.

Business model

Trace sells payment and settlement infrastructure to businesses on an API and account basis, intermediating currency conversion and cross-border transfers between local Brazilian/LatAm rails and global stablecoin and banking rails. Early materials describe it as reducing the transfer spread charged on cross-border movements from roughly 4% to 0.2%.

Traction

More than $10bn in institutional cross-border payment volume processed to date. The company serves as the primary infrastructure provider for the four largest global payment companies operating in Latin America, including dLocal, and reported over 30 enterprise clients at the time of its 2022 seed round.

Latest developments

In June 2026 Trace closed a $32m Series A led by CoinFund with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Crypto, Valor Capital, Paxos, HOF Capital, Chainlink Labs, SNZ Capital and individual backers including Sean Neville (Circle), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Labs), Bam Azizi (Mesh) and Ricardo Villela Marino (Itaú Unibanco). Proceeds are to expand transaction capacity, deepen FX, bank connectivity, compliance and stablecoin settlement products, and extend regulated infrastructure into additional corridors. New settlement products are in development, and a dashboard and an unnamed product with a waitlist are announced as coming soon.