5 Infrastructure Bets VCs Are Making in 2026

The fintech funding winter is thawing, but the money is flowing somewhere different. Global fintech investment rebounded to $116 billion in 2025, up from $95.5 billion the year before. Yet deal volume fell to a nine-year low. The signal is clear: investors are writing fewer, larger cheques into companies building foundational infrastructure rather than chasing consumer-facing growth stories.

QED Investors’ 2026 outlook captures the mood: their dollars have already shifted toward infrastructure. Modern Treasury argues bluntly that the neobank boom is slowing as infrastructure-first fintechs capture more of the value chain. Here are the five bets absorbing the most conviction capital.

1. Stablecoin payment rails

This is the single loudest signal in fintech funding right now. Stablecoin-related infrastructure attracted over $495 million in Q1 2026 alone. Rain, an enterprise stablecoin payments platform, raised a $250 million Series C led by ICONIQ at a $1.95 billion valuation, just ten months after its Series A. VelaFi, Levl, and others followed with rounds of their own.

The investment thesis has shifted decisively. Stablecoins are no longer a crypto-native settlement tool. They are becoming enterprise-grade payment rails. When Y Combinator starts offering USDC payouts to startups and Visa expands USDC into its core settlement operations, the direction is unmistakable. The companies building compliance, custody, and on/off-ramp infrastructure at scale are where capital is concentrating.

2. Clearing and settlement infrastructure

Correspondent banking was designed for a world where a handful of large institutions moved money on behalf of everyone else. That model is creaking. For platforms operating across ten or twenty markets, each with its own banking partner, settlement window, and reconciliation format, the operational overhead is becoming a constraint on growth.

A new category of specialist clearing providers is emerging. Companies like ClearBank, Banking Circle, and Lorum are building infrastructure that consolidates cross-border settlement, multi-market treasury management, and account structures into fewer integration points. Platforms that can manage cash positions, FX, and compliance across jurisdictions from a single layer will outcompete those stitching together bilateral bank relationships market by market.

3. Compliance as infrastructure

Finextra recently argued that fintech’s next crisis will not come from funding but from compliance. The regtech sector is projected to grow from roughly $15 billion today to over $100 billion within a decade. Every new financial product, every geographic expansion, and every regulatory framework like DORA or the EU AI Act creates compliance obligations that manual processes cannot scale to meet.

VCs are paying attention. TRM Labs raised a round led by Blockchain Capital and Goldman Sachs for on-chain compliance tooling. Copla, a Lithuanian regtech, secured a Series A for real-time ICT compliance infrastructure. Compliance is becoming a platform, not a department. The companies that allow fintechs and banks to operationalize regulation continuously, rather than scramble at audit time, are winning conviction capital.

4. Embedded treasury for platforms

Embedded finance was once about checkout-layer payments. In 2026, the ambition has moved upstream into treasury: FX, sweeps, cash positioning, and liquidity management, all embedded into the platforms where businesses already operate. Airwallex closed a $330 million Series G at an $8 billion valuation, now processing over $130 billion in annualized payment volume and approaching $1 billion in annual revenue. Stripe continues expanding its Treasury product suite beyond payments into full-stack platform finance.

The thesis is being reinforced by a parallel trend: tokenized money market funds grew 110% through 2025 to $8.6 billion in AUM, with BlackRock’s BUIDL fund alone approaching $3 billion. As tokenized MMFs gain acceptance as eligible collateral (the CFTC recommended them for derivatives margin in late 2025), they are becoming a core component of platform treasury rather than a standalone crypto product.

For VCs, the appeal is stickiness. Once a platform manages a customer’s multi-currency balances and FX, switching costs are enormous. Infrastructure providers at the treasury layer control a much larger share of the value chain than those operating at the payment layer alone.

5. Real-time reconciliation and ledger infrastructure

The least glamorous bet on this list, and potentially the most durable. As payment volumes grow and settlement windows compress, the reconciliation problem compounds. Platforms running multi-currency, multi-entity operations cannot rely on end-of-day batch files. They need continuous, automated reconciliation built into the ledger itself.

Capital is flowing in. Formance raised a $21 million Series A co-led by PayPal Ventures and Portage, after growing revenue 10x in twelve months. The company is building a programmable, open-source ledger with reconciliation, payment orchestration, and connectivity modules layered on top. Fragment raised $9 million for a programmable double-entry ledger aimed at fintechs. Modern Treasury, valued at $2 billion, continues to expand as the category anchor.

The thesis is that the ledger is the product. Every other trend on this list needs a reconciliation layer underneath it. The companies building that layer are becoming essential plumbing for the entire financial infrastructure stack.

The pattern

The common thread across all five: VCs are funding the infrastructure that sits between platforms and the financial system. Consumer fintech is saturated. The next wave of value creation is in the pipes and rails that allow platforms to move, hold, and reconcile money across borders without stitching together dozens of banking relationships. The market is bifurcating between horizontal platforms that win through breadth and specialist providers that win through regulatory depth and technical precision. The middle is disappearing.