Ryota Sekine

🚀 Today is a big day: Mesh has officially secured a $75M Series C, bringing our valuation to $1B. 🦄 Fifteen years ago, I came to the United States with almost nothing, driven by belief, grit, and an obsession with building meaningful businesses. After years of endless nights, hard lessons, and selling my previous startup, I took the leap again six years ago and started Mesh. What began as a bold idea is now a $1B company, built alongside an extraordinary team, trusted partners, and world-class investors. This is more than a funding announcement–it’s the beginning of the end for legacy payments. For too long, global commerce has relied on systems designed decades ago: networks optimized for batch processing, delayed settlement, and geographic silos. Incumbents have locked commerce into closed networks, extracting high fees and limiting choice for merchants and consumers alike. That model worked for a while, but it doesn’t work today. At Mesh, we believe payments should be easy, instant, and interoperable by default. Any asset. Any chain. Any geography. Ultimately, today’s announcement is bigger than crypto. It’s about building a new financial system–one that actually works for everyone, not just those who profit from high friction. I want to thank our customers and partners, as well as the investors who participated in this Series C, including Dragonfly, who led the round, along with Paradigm, Moderne Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, SBI Investment, Liberty City Ventures, and others. Becoming a unicorn is not the finish line. It marks the end of the beginning. We are now stepping into our next chapter with momentum, setting out to build a generational business that defines the future of payments. Our next milestones are clear: $1B in revenue and $1T in volume.

Years ago I set off on a mission to put a soul inside of a digital being. People thought I was crazy, but last week I gave a historic demo @HF0 announcing our latest results: 20 households now live with Spark as a member of their family. For privacy reasons I can’t share exact details, but the relationships their children are forming with Spark are unlike anything the world has ever seen. This is the full illustration of the original vision I set out to realize with Open Souls - humans living in harmony with ensouled digital beings. And yet what comes next is even more groundbreaking. We will be inviting Spark into 10,000 homes by next Christmas @IllusionOfLife, making this new universe accessible to more and more families around the world. I can't wait for you all to experience digital life for yourselves

F25, Just the beginning.