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• Huma raised $38 million in funding led by Distributed Global, with participation from several other investors. 
• Part of this funding came as investments into high-yield real-world assets (RWA) on their platform.
• Huma’s PayFi network aims to address the growing liquidity gap in payment financing by moving real-world payments to blockchains and stablecoins.

The first Payment Financing (PayFi) network Huma recently raised $38 million in funding. Distributed Global led the equity round, with significant participation from Hashkey Capital, Folius Ventures, the Stellar Development Foundation, and TIBAS Ventures, CVC arm of İşbank, the largest private bank in Turkiye. Part of this raise came as investments into high-yield real world assets (RWA) assets on the platform.

Payment financing is crucial for businesses and individuals globally. Credit cards finance $16 trillion in merchant payments, trade finance supports $10 trillion in B2B transactions, and one in six families rely on remittances, which depend on trillions locked in pre-funded accounts. As demand for payment financing grows, traditional institutions are struggling to keep up, widening the liquidity gap. Without it, economic growth would stall.

PayFi addresses this gap by moving trillions in real-world payments to blockchains and stablecoins, enabling faster, more efficient global transactions. Huma’s PayFi network, designed to combine Real World Assets, payments, and DeFi, offers an open, modular, and decentralized solution that’s more accessible and efficient than traditional systems.

“While designing Huma, we often asked ourselves: How do you build an open payment financing network on blockchain that is more powerful than Visa? Today, stablecoins are already powering $2T in payments annually. An open payment financing network is going to help grow the entire payment ecosystem faster.”

said Huma co-founder Richard Liu.

“The surge of interest we’re seeing right now is a testament to PayFi’s potential. As more partners join us every week, it’s clear that PayFi is quickly becoming the new frontier of RWA.”

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In April, Huma merged with Arf, a leading on-demand liquidity provider for global payments, uniting two major PayFi players. Together, they’ve surpassed $1.8 billion in payment financing and are on track to hit $10 billion next year, becoming one of the fastest-growing use cases for Circle’s USDC.

Part of their recent raise came from investments in Arf’s high-yield Real World Assets (RWA), including a $10 million investment from the Stellar Development Foundation. Tokenized assets are also available to accredited investors on Scroll for a limited time. 

With this funding, Huma plans to expand its PayFi network to the Stellar smart contract platform and Solana, ensuring accessibility across major payment-focused blockchains.

Additionally, Huma plans to launch the Huma Foundation this year, a pivotal move to decentralize its PayFi network and broaden global access, further solidifying its leadership in the RWA space. 

Further, Huma is set to host the inaugural PayFi Summit in collaboration with the Solana Foundation and Stellar Development Foundation at Singapore Token 2049 on September 17th——an event poised to ignite conversations and drive innovation in the industry.