Former AmEx and Visa Executives Raise $4M to Embed Stablecoin Payments in Brand Loyalty Programs

Former AmEx and Visa Executives Raise $4M to Embed Stablecoin Payments in Brand Loyalty Programs

Two credit card industry veterans are betting they can smuggle stablecoins into mainstream commerce by hiding them inside the thing Americans actually use: rewards programs.

Rhythmic, a startup founded by former American Express and Visa executives Aaron Marks and Joseph Hayes, announced Thursday it raised $4 million in seed funding led by Dragonfly, with participation from Mirana Ventures, The Fintech Fund, and other backers. The company plans to partner with consumer brands to offer stablecoin-powered financial products—cash back, rewards, stored-value accounts—that look and feel like traditional loyalty programs but run on crypto rails behind the scenes.

The pitch is essentially this: What if every mid-to-large consumer brand could offer something like the Starbucks rewards program or Walmart's OnePay credit card, but without building the entire financial infrastructure themselves? Rhythmic handles the plumbing—stablecoins moving money in the background—while customers just see a co-branded Visa card and rewards accumulating in their account.

"We are giving everyday users the power of stablecoins through brands that they already know and trust," said Hayes, the company's chief product and technology officer, in an interview with Fortune. The strategy targets what the founders see as stablecoins' current limitation: they're popular with crypto natives and users in emerging markets, but haven't cracked mainstream American commerce.

Marks spent more than five years at American Express before joining Circle, the stablecoin issuer. Hayes logged over eight years at Mastercard, then led crypto and stablecoin products at Walmart. That combination—payments infrastructure expertise plus actual experience trying to make crypto work at scale inside a massive retailer—is the founders' argument for why this attempt might work where others haven't.

The mechanics are straightforward, at least from the user's perspective. Customers deposit money into a stored-value account embedded in their favorite brand's app or website. They get a co-branded Visa card. They earn rewards. The fact that stablecoins are handling the money movement is, ideally, invisible. (Whether "invisible crypto" is the path to mainstream adoption or just another way to avoid the fundamental question of whether people actually want this is, of course, the debate.)

Rhythmic did not disclose which brands it's partnering with or the company's valuation from the seed round. Marks told Fortune the startup is targeting medium and large consumer brands—the kind with enough customer volume to make a financial product worthwhile but perhaps not enough scale to justify building one from scratch.

The company plans to launch mid-year, according to the announcement. The timing is interesting: stablecoins have gained legitimacy as payments infrastructure, but the broader "embed finance into everything" trend has had mixed results. Buy-now-pay-later looked revolutionary until default rates started climbing. Banking-as-a-service was the future until Synapse collapsed and stranded millions in customer funds.

What Rhythmic is proposing—brands becoming "the center of their financial life" for customers, as Marks described it—raises the obvious question: Do people want their relationship with, say, a coffee chain or an apparel brand to expand into managing their money? Or is this solving for a problem that exists more in venture pitch decks than in actual consumer behavior?

The $4 million seed round suggests at least some investors think it's worth finding out. Whether CFOs at consumer brands—who've watched the embedded finance space produce as many cautionary tales as success stories—will agree is the next test.