Atum has emerged from stealth with $13.5 million in funding to build an open payments network designed to coordinate global money movement across currencies, blockchains and payment rails.
Investors include Variant, PayPal Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Road Capital, Mirana Ventures, First Commit and Credibly Neutral, along with strategic adviser Charlie Songhurst.
Atum describes its platform as a coordination layer rather than a currency, blockchain or payments rail. The company does not take custody of customer funds and is designed to remain neutral among the different networks participating in transactions.
The platform lets developers, payment companies, and enterprises submit payment requests, while settlement providers compete to fulfill them using supported blockchains and stablecoins.
Senders can specify what asset they want to send while recipients identify what they want to receive. Atum then coordinates authorization, routing and confirmation between the participants.
The network also supports reversible payments and identity capabilities.
Atum is targeting card issuers and acquirers, payment service providers, card networks, stablecoin orchestration platforms, wallets, fintech companies and enterprises, along with developers building applications on top of the infrastructure.
The platform supports traditional stablecoin payments and agentic payments using protocols including x402 and MPP. Atum said both humans and AI agents are already completing payments through the network.
Founder and CEO Pete Cooling previously led Visa’s crypto product team and spent about a decade researching and developing blockchain-based payment systems.
Cooling also represented Visa at the Linux Foundation’s OpenWallet Foundation, where he worked on standards involving digital identity, financial accounts, payment cards and stablecoins.
KEY QUOTES:
“This is my life’s work. In 2014 I saw that blockchains were payments networks, and everything since has pointed to the same conclusion. Onchain accounts are the future bank accounts, and new infrastructure is needed to make money move more seamlessly than it does today. Atum is that infrastructure.”
Pete Cooling, Founder and CEO of Atum
