Introducing Ground
The Money Infrastructure Company
The financial industry’s next infrastructure layer already exists. It runs 24/7. It settles near instantly. It generates yield on idle balances without a treasury desk. Most teams just can’t reach it yet, because the interface is not grounded in their needs or their customers’ expectations.
Introducing Ground. We launched out of stealth today, alongside a $3.6 million pre-seed funding round, to embed onchain finance everywhere. The investment was led by Bain Capital Crypto and ParaFi, with additional funding from Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, and Consonant Ventures. Here’s why:
The Fintech Pattern Redux
In 2010, accepting a card payment online required a merchant account, a gateway, a processor relationship, PCI scope, and a six-month integration. The rails existed, but they were unusable by anyone who wasn’t a payments specialist. Square, Stripe, and other Fintechs didn’t invent card networks; they built an interface that made them easily accessible. Once that interface existed, every company became a payments company by default. The companies that adopted early compounded, and the companies that waited saw their checkout conversion lag and lost ground.
The same pattern is repeating with onchain finance. Stablecoin balances clear at scale across regulated counterparties. Tokenized assets sit on institutional balance sheets with public disclosures. Onchain Lending markets have operated continuously for years with auditable books. What’s missing is a unifying interface that lets any financial platform or asset manager integrate onchain finance the way they can integrate Plaid or Stripe: one API, ledger output, and operations surface, with no engineering retraining or new mastery of chains, protocols, or gas.
That is the gap Ground is built to close, making onchain finance accessible and embeddable.
Yield Is The Wedge
Ground has started with yield because it is the smallest unit of onchain advantage that maps cleanly to a product surface that all banking or finance users already understand: their balance.
A balance is the most valuable real estate in a financial product. It is also where the legacy stack runs out of options: Sweep programs are slow to configure, narrow in scope, and increasingly uncompetitive. Rewards programs subsidized by interchange or balance sheets are getting squeezed. The financial platforms that need to grow deposits cannot pay for them out of margin or treasury forever.
Onchain yield sources solve this without forcing the platform to rebuild their core. They pick the sources, set the policy, and expose the balance, now growing in real-time. Ground provisions onchain wallets, deploys pre-configured allocations, abstracts network fees, and emits ledger-ready accounting with source attribution.
Yield arrives seamlessly because integrating Ground is fast, yield is transparent, and management is convenient.
"Making onchain finance accessible and embeddable is a fundamental shift in how capital will be managed," said Reid Cuming, CEO and Co-Founder of Ground. “The global asset management industry oversees more than $147 trillion, and there are trillions of dollars idling in pre-funded accounts, neobanks and blockchain wallets. That is a massive untapped opportunity, and we are building the foundation that empowers any financial application or manager to easily integrate onchain yield into their platform. Ground supercharges their products and idle balances.”
The Money Infrastructure Company
As stablecoin and tokenization adoption increases, so will the demand to do more than hold, send, or spend, such as earn, borrow, and invest, onchain. Ground will power this transition to blockchain-based financial products, supercharging existing venues and new platforms.
Ground is built by founders who have shipped this category before. Reid Cuming co-founded Superstate as COO and was VP & GM of Compound Treasury, the first decentralized finance product to receive an S&P credit rating. Sam Yoon founded Braid as CEO and led engineering and product at HIFI, where he built stablecoin cross-border infrastructure powering hundreds of millions of dollars across hundreds of applications. Ground is backed by leading venture firms including Bain Capital Crypto, ParaFi, Nascent, Robot Ventures, Chapter One, and Consonant Ventures.
“Stablecoin adoption started with remittance, tokenization, and dollar-account use cases. Naturally, what fintechs and institutions are asking next is how can they further tap into onchain products, especially credit markets to give their customers higher yield and lower borrow rates. This is not at all easy to do today,” said Parth Chopra, Partner at Bain Capital Crypto. “We invested in Ground because they’re building the infrastructure to provide fintech developers with easy, secure, and compliant access to many different credit products. So they can enable delightful financial access to their customers.”
The rails are built. The interface is here. We know what fintech founders and operators need because we have been them. Let’s talk, or sign up and start building.