Introducing: Speed

Dec 16

We are excited to announce our investment in Speed, a company bringing to life the vision of Bitcoin as global money—not just a store of value, but a true means of payment used worldwide. Speed is building Lightning-native Bitcoin and stablecoin payment infrastructure designed for real-world use at global scale. We co-led Speed’s $8 million funding round with Tether.

The level of traction of the company stands out in the landscape of Bitcoin companies, and indicates how quickly the Bitcoin ecosystem is developing. Over the past twelve months, the platform has processed more than $1.5 billion in payment volume, serves over 1.2 million users, and supports enterprise-grade merchant adoption across both online and in-person commerce.

We created ego death capital to invest in Bitcoiners building Bitcoin-native companies pushing the ecosystem from theory into reality. Speed is doing exactly that.

The Founders

Raj Patel and Jay Patel are serial entrepreneurs and lifelong technologists. Their previous startup, Orderhive, is a global SaaS automation platform that streamlined e‑commerce operations for thousands of merchants worldwide. Orderhive grew rapidly and achieved a successful acquisition exit. Raj and Jay gained invaluable insight into how slow settlements and fragmented payment systems still limit global commerce, and their passion for Bitcoin led them to tackle the problem by building Speed.

Driving towards everyday payments

In practice, most payment solutions remained fragmented, expensive, or inaccessible to real merchants and users. Bitcoin’s Lightning Network solved speed and cost, but lacked integration with highly-used stablecoins, merchant friendly applications, and compliance-ready rails.

Speed brings these pieces together.

By combining Lightning with stablecoins, Speed enables instant, low-fee payments for consumers, creators, platforms, and merchants. The result is infrastructure that works globally, settles in seconds, and can be deployed at enterprise scale without sacrificing usability or regulatory discipline.

A unified consumer and merchant ecosystem

Speed operates two tightly integrated products:

Speed Wallet is a consumer and business wallet supporting native Bitcoin and stablecoins with instant settlement. It has surpassed 1.2 million users, making it one of the fastest-growing Lightning wallets in the world. Users can send, receive, and spend value globally with near-zero fees, while accessing a growing ecosystem of embedded applications.

Speed Merchant provides merchants, creators, and platforms with a high-performance API and dashboard to accept and route Lightning and stablecoin payments worldwide. The platform supports one-second settlement, ultra-low fees, and enterprise-grade reliability. It is already live with major brands, including Steak ’n Shake, one of the first national restaurant chains to deploy Lightning payments at scale (just makes you want some tallow fries, right?).

Together, these products create a two-sided network that reinforces adoption across users and merchants, while generating meaningful revenue from real transaction volume.

Why we invested

Speed stood out to us for several reasons:

Real traction at scale. Over $1.5B in annualized volume, millions of transactions, over 100% YoY growth, and strong unit economics demonstrate product-market fit today.
Bitcoin-native architecture. Lightning is the core settlement rail, not an afterthought, with stablecoins integrated to expand usability without compromising speed or cost.
Compliance as a feature, not a constraint. Speed has built its infrastructure to meet U.S. and global regulatory standards, enabling enterprise adoption without neutering the advantages of Bitcoin rails.
Founder-market fit. The team brings deep operational experience, prior successful exits, and a long-term commitment to Bitcoin as a payment network, not just an asset.

Building the payment layer Bitcoin needs

We believe Bitcoin’s success as money depends on infrastructure that works for everyday commerce, not just savings. Payments must be fast, cheap, global, and reliable. Speed is proving that this is possible today.

By bridging Lightning and stablecoins in a single, compliant platform, Speed is positioning itself as foundational infrastructure for the Bitcoin and stablecoin economy, serving merchants, platforms, and users across both developed and emerging markets.

We are proud to partner with Speed and support the team as they continue to scale what we believe can become a critical component of the bitcoin-powered payments infrastructure.