10 months from Series A to Series C, with a total financing amount exceeding 338 million USD, what does Rain want to do?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

The next competition for U cards may not lie in card issuance itself, but in who can make users use them repeatedly.

On June 15, Rain announced the launch of a rewards program for platform partners. This is a set of loyalty capabilities directly embedded into Rain's card issuance infrastructure, allowing partners to configure point names, earning ratios, redemption methods, bonuses, and merchant subsidy activities within their own card products.

On the surface, Rain Rewards is a points and loyalty feature aimed at card projects; but within the context of Rain's overall business, it resembles a key piece of the stablecoin payment infrastructure puzzle.

Rain is a stablecoin payment infrastructure company. Its clients are not ordinary retail users, but enterprises, neobanks, fintech platforms, developers, and AI agents. Partners can issue stablecoin-backed cards and wallets through Rain, accessing deposit and withdrawal functions, cross-border payments, rewards programs, and risk control capabilities. For end users, the experience may simply be a card that can be used for spending offline and online; for businesses, Rain offers a complete backend system that integrates stablecoins into traditional payment networks.

Card Rewards Program: Retention is Crucial

The core of Rain Rewards is not about transferring points to the blockchain, but about embedding the rewards program into the card issuance infrastructure itself.

According to an announcement released by Rain on June 15, any partner operating a card project on the Rain platform can launch their own branded loyalty program without needing to connect to a third-party points provider or build a rewards system from scratch. Rain stated that in a previous private test of the rewards program with Avalanche Card, cardholders who joined the rewards program spent 25% more than those who did not.

Its mechanism is also closer to financial infrastructure rather than ordinary marketing tools. Points, earning rules, and redemptions are incorporated into the same system that handles consumption and settlement. Additionally, points are only generated on-chain after the transaction is finally completed, so refunds or cancellations do not leave unmanageable liabilities.

Partners can set project names, point return ratios, category bonuses, merchant subsidy activities, and also allow users to redeem points against bills within their own apps, or exchange for hotels and flights through white-label travel portals.

This capability comes from Rain's acquisition of Uptop in November 2025. Uptop is an on-chain rewards platform that previously provided reward systems for teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers (professional basketball team from Cleveland, Ohio) and the Detroit Pistons (professional basketball team from Detroit, Michigan).

After Rain acquired Uptop, it integrated the rewards capabilities into its card and wallet platform to form a more complete enterprise-level payment product stack.

This is crucial. If stablecoin cards only address the question of "can it be spent," it would be difficult to compete with mature credit cards and fintech products. In reality, card projects are competing for user frequency, merchant subsidies, benefit designs, and brand belonging. By putting Rewards into the underlying system, Rain essentially allows partners to directly possess an operable consumption growth tool while issuing stablecoin cards.

What is Rain: The Backend of Stablecoin Payments

Rain was co-founded by Farooq Malik (CEO) and Charles Yoo-Naut (CTO).

According to an interview by Circle Ventures in 2022 with the two founders, we can see that their entrepreneurial starting point was not initially about making stablecoin cards, but rather a side project called SignandWire in 2021. This project initially aimed to embed payment functionality into the e-signature process. Later, entrepreneurs inquired whether they could use USDC as a payment method for signed investment documents, leading Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut to focus on the near real-time settlement capability of stablecoins. They first integrated USDC on Ethereum for SignandWire, and subsequently integrated USDC on Solana in response to demand from Solana ecosystem entrepreneurs.

In discussions with Web3 entrepreneurs, they discovered a more frequent issue: many DAOs, protocol teams, and on-chain native companies hold significant amounts of crypto assets but still need to deal with temporary withdrawals, reimbursements, and manual processes to pay for expenses like GitHub, SaaS, travel, and computers.

Rain initially focused on addressing the expenditure management needs of these types of teams, providing corporate cards and expense management tools to act as a bridge between traditional financial systems and Web3 funding systems. Subsequently, Rain's business expanded from DAO expenditure management to stablecoin issuance, wallets, settlements, and enterprise-level payment infrastructure, following the same underlying logic: allowing on-chain assets to enter real-world payment scenarios in a familiar way for enterprises and merchants.

Today, Rain is a Principal Member of Visa and Mastercard, able to offer partners stablecoin-supported credit cards, prepaid cards, and related wallet capabilities through the two major card organization networks.

In 2025, Rain also joined Visa's stablecoin settlement pilot and stated that it has migrated Visa card settlements to USDC, allowing settlements with Visa to occur seven days a week, 365 days a year. When users spend with Visa cards issued by Rain, Visa still settles with the merchant's acquiring party through the usual process, while Rain completes network settlement in the background using stablecoins.

It is worth mentioning that the recently popular U card Plasma One is also issued by Rain under Visa's authorization.

In other words, Rain's role is not to replace existing payment networks but to integrate stablecoin settlement, issuance, wallet, and compliance capabilities into traditional card networks, enabling enterprises to carry on-chain funds into offline and online consumption scenarios using a unified infrastructure.

Accelerated Financing: 10 Months from Series A to Series C

Rain's financing rhythm reflects the revaluation of stablecoin payment infrastructure over the past year.

In March 2025, Rain announced the completion of a 24.5 million USD Series A financing, led by Norwest Venture Partners, with new investors joining including Galaxy Ventures, Goldcrest, Thayer, and Hard Yaka, while existing investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coinbase Ventures, Vinyl Capital, Canonical Crypto, and Latitude Capital also participated. At that time, Rain stated that its transactions covered over 100 countries and had grown more than 15 times in the past 12 months.

Five months later, in August 2025, Rain completed a 58 million USD Series B financing, led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from Dragonfly, Galaxy Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, Samsung Next, Lightspeed, and Norwest. Rain stated in the announcement that transaction volume had grown tenfold since January 2025, and the Visa card project had processed millions of transactions across more than 150 countries.

In January of this year, Rain completed a 250 million USD Series C financing, led by ICONIQ, with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer Venture Partners, Galaxy Ventures, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest, and Endeavor Catalyst.

After this round of financing, Rain's valuation reached 1.95 billion USD, with total financing exceeding 338 million USD. Rain also disclosed that its annualized transaction volume surpassed 3 billion USD, serving over 200 partners, including Western Union, Nuvei, and KAST.

What is most noteworthy in this set of numbers is not just the financing amount itself, but the density of time. Rain advanced from Series A to Series C in 10 months, indicating that institutional funds are reevaluating stablecoin payments as enterprise-level financial infrastructure.

From Human Cardholders to AI Agents, Rain Aims to Occupy the Programmable Payment Entry

Rain's product line is no longer just a stablecoin card.

On June 9, 2026, Rain released the Agent Control Layer. This feature allows businesses and developers to define the spending boundaries of AI Agents at the infrastructure level, including acceptable merchant categories, approved merchants or payees, transaction amounts, transaction frequency, the number of available Agent cards, and card validity periods. Rain stated that these rules would be enforced before card issuance or transaction initiation, rather than retroactively after transactions.

This extends Rain's payment system from "human-used cards" to "machine-used money." If AI agents need to subscribe to software, book travel, execute procurement, or make payments to suppliers in the future, the primary issue businesses need to address is not the payment button, but permission boundaries: who can spend, when they can spend, whom they can spend to, and how much they can spend at most. Stablecoins provide programmable funds, card networks provide merchant coverage, and the control layer gives businesses the opportunity to accept this automation.

From the Agent Control Layer to the card rewards program Rewards, Rain's trajectory is becoming increasingly clear. What it aims to build is not a single product but a complete stablecoin payment operating system: cards are responsible for reaching merchants, wallets hold assets, deposit and withdrawal functions connect fiat currency, Rewards is responsible for retention, and the agent control layer oversees permissions and compliance in automated payments.

The mainstreaming of stablecoin payments may not occur in exchange interfaces. They might appear in a corporate card, a cross-border salary, a coffee, or a virtual card temporarily generated by an AI Agent. Rain aims to stand behind these transactions, allowing on-chain funds to flow in seamless ways that users are not consciously aware of.