Riva Raises £2.2M Pre-Seed to Build the Blockchain-Powered B2B Payments Infrastructure That Legacy Systems Can’t Provide

August 12, 2025

Riva, the London-based cross-border B2B payments company, raised £2.2 million ($3 million) in a pre-seed funding round in August 2025, led by Project A, with angel investors from Revolut, Monzo, Ebury, and JP Morgan participating. The capital will fund global operational expansion in Europe, Asia, and North America, build out the engineering team, and support the company’s pursuit of payment institution authorisation in the UK and EU, as well as MiCA and VASP licences in the EU and Switzerland. Riva was founded in 2025 by Niklas Höjman, formerly of Revolut, and Mahendra Katoch, formerly of Wise.

Cross-border business payments have a persistent and well-documented problem. International transactions between businesses are still predominantly routed through correspondent banking networks — chains of intermediary banks that process, verify, and settle transfers one institution at a time. This architecture was designed for a world of paper and telegraphic communication; it produces settlement times of one to five business days, per-transaction fees that accumulate through each intermediary layer, exchange rate spreads applied at multiple points, and limited visibility into where a payment is in the process and when it will arrive. These friction costs are material for businesses with high volumes of international payments, and they are structural: they are built into the architecture of the legacy system, not addressable through incremental improvement.

Höjman and Katoch saw this problem from inside the fintech companies most directly attacking it. Revolut and Wise have both made meaningful progress reducing the cost and speed of consumer and SME cross-border payments, but both largely operate on traditional fiat-to-fiat infrastructure, using bank relationships and currency hedging rather than fundamentally new settlement rails. Both founders experienced the limitations of this approach directly and concluded that the next step in cross-border payments requires stablecoin-based settlement as a native option rather than an add-on. Riva’s platform is built around a “dual-rail” model: for each payment, it routes dynamically through either blockchain-based stablecoin settlement or traditional banking rails, depending on which delivers better speed, cost, and compliance outcomes for that specific transaction. This gives business clients the benefits of stablecoin settlement — near-instant finality, no correspondent bank delays, lower per-transaction cost — without requiring them to manage crypto wallets or accept volatility risk, since the stablecoins in question are fiat-pegged assets like USDC or EURC.

Project A, the Berlin-based venture fund with a strong portfolio in European B2B software and fintech, led the round, with Malin Posern describing Riva’s dual-rail system as “elegantly solving” for both speed and flexibility in a market still reliant on legacy processes. The angel participation from Revolut, Monzo, and JP Morgan executives adds domain credibility: practitioners who have built and operated payments infrastructure at scale are backing a team they believe has identified the architectural shift that the next generation of B2B cross-border payments requires.

The timing is favourable. Regulatory frameworks for stablecoin payments are maturing rapidly: the EU’s MiCA regulation provides a clear licensing path, the UK government has signalled favourable intent on stablecoin regulation, and the US administration has accelerated stablecoin adoption policy. As the legal clarity around stablecoin payments as a payment instrument solidifies, the demand from businesses for faster, cheaper, and more transparent international payment rails will accelerate.

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