Foundry & Co was founded in 2024 by Ana Ferreira and Wei Tan — a former Mercury banking lead and a former Stripe Treasury PM — who had each spent years observing the same structural gap from different angles inside modern fintech. On one side, a new wave of companies was forming: AI-native startups, crypto-adjacent protocols, and globally distributed SaaS businesses with non-traditional revenue flows. On the other, the banking stack they relied on hadn’t meaningfully evolved to understand or support them.

Their shared conclusion was that the issue wasn’t just policy friction or compliance conservatism — it was architectural. Legacy banking infrastructure was built for stable, geographically concentrated businesses with predictable cash flow patterns. The next generation of companies behaves differently: multi-currency by default, globally distributed from day one, and often operating in regulatory gray zones that traditional institutions avoid entirely.

Foundry & Co is designed around that mismatch. Instead of treating banking, payments, FX, and treasury as separate products stitched together after the fact, they unify them into a single embedded financial layer for modern companies. The platform is built to handle complex flows — cross-border revenue, multi-entity structures, stablecoin-linked settlements, and AI-driven SaaS billing models — without forcing companies into legacy banking assumptions.

The broader bet is that “unbankable” is becoming a temporary label, not a permanent category. As infrastructure costs fall and regulatory tooling improves, it becomes increasingly viable to underwrite businesses that don’t fit traditional molds — provided the financial stack is built to understand them natively rather than retrofitted.

We led the pre-seed in Q4 2025. Since then, Foundry & Co has grown to serve over 200 companies across AI, crypto infrastructure, and globally distributed software. The platform is now processing several million dollars in monthly transaction volume, steadily expanding its footprint among startups that sit just outside the comfort zone of legacy financial institutions — but squarely inside the future of software-driven commerce.