Mesh

Mesh CEO Bam Azizi told me his thesis: Crypto is "built by crypto bros for crypto bros" and doesn't pass the grandma test. Mesh, fresh off a $75M Series C at $1B led by Dragonfly, abstracts wallet/chain fragmentation so users tap-and-pay. Born in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, PhD from Technical University of Munich, sold prior startup NoPassword (acquired by LogMeIn) to LogMeIn (2019). Mesh pivoted from B2C to B2B in 2022, post-FTX. Big bet: agentic commerce + microtransactions. Full Fortt Knox conversation linked in the comments:

Crypto is becoming spendable — and AI agents are already spending it. From crypto cards going mainstream to AI agents moving money autonomously, the payments stack is being rebuilt in real time. Mesh sits underneath both shifts: the settlement layer turning crypto into spend, and the infrastructure giving agents a way to transact across wallets, chains, and currencies. Next week at Consensus 2026 Miami, Arjun Mukherjee and Gabriele Galli will be on stage making the case. ▶️ How Agentic Commerce Is Re-Engineering the Global Marketplace  May 6 at 3:40 PM, Convergence Stage  Arjun Mukherjee with Ian Dilick, Louis Amira, moderated by Rich Widmann ▶️ The Global Payments Pivot: Crypto Cards, Rewards & Beyond May 7 at 12:50 PM, Convergence Stage Moderated by Gabriele Galli, with Christian Rau, Ray Hernandez, John Timoney Gomez, Mark Zalan ▶️ The Agent Wallet Is the New Browser May 7 at 2:25 PM, Convergence Stage Arjun Mukherjee with Felix Fan, moderated by Lia Müller Peña The shift is already happening. Mesh is the rails underneath it.

🚨 Ep. 7 of Agentic Commerce: PayPal’s Plan to Win the Agent Economy Simon Taylor & Bam Azizi are joined by: 👉 Kausik Rajgopal, EVP, Strategy, Corporate Development & Partnerships, PayPal To discuss: 🕵 Trust and fraud management in agentic commerce 🤖 AI-driven purchase journeys during Black Friday 🔎 Merchants needing AI channel product discoverability 🪙 Payment options for AI agents including stablecoins 🥊 Consumer versus agent payment optimization differences ⚙️ PayPal integrations with Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity 🌐 Travel and hospitality as key agentic commerce use case 💸 Stablecoin use for microtransactions and real-time settlement ❗️ Interoperability challenges among multiple agent protocols *** 👉 𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

Asia is not just a market for Mesh. It's a frontier of the tokenized economy—and we're going all in. We're excited to welcome Jason Ne Win as CEO of APAC, leading our expansion across one of the most important regions for the future of crypto payments. Jason joins us from Binance, where he served as Chief of Staff to Changpeng Zhao and Richard Teng, leading global government relations, enterprise strategy, and market expansion. In his new role, Jason will spearhead Mesh's APAC growth strategy, scaling local payment rails and deepening integrations with the region's largest digital wallets and financial institutions. "The infrastructure for crypto payments across the region is still being written, and Mesh has the product, the team, and the backing to define it." — Jason Ne Win 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eTKfApgk

The agent economy needs open rails. Proud to be a launch partner of OKX's Agent Payments Protocol. More to come from us on this... 🤝

Had an absolute banger of a time speaking with Simon Taylor and Bam Azizi on the Tokenized Podcast last week. We talked about how transaction foundation models are redefining the next frontier of building intelligence in financial services. Exposing transaction-style data to transformer architecture creates contextual embeddings that capture the dynamic and static patterns of user behavior. These embeddings pave the path to serve downstream use cases, including fraud detection, personalization, credit limit increases, etc. The work of Revolut, Mastercard, and Adyen in this domain, showcased at the recent NVIDIA GTC, highlights this trend. And of course, we chatted about the evolution of agentic commerce and how open models such as NVIDIA Nemotron are accelerating the rollout of such applications at scale, highlighting the great progress we’ve made with PayPal. Tune in to the podcast to hear the full conversation! Also, a big shoutout to Simon for his amazingly detailed write-up in the Fintech Brainfood newsletter.  Links in comments below.

Mesh is collaborating with Circle to expand USDC settlement across the Mesh ecosystem. This expansion streamlines how enterprises, merchants, and PSPs move value globally, providing a more unified, efficient path to near-instant, cross-chain settlement. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eqsJv8f2

If you’ve seen a Mesh post before, you can probably guess: we’re still growing & hiring. And we’re still building the infrastructure powering how crypto moves. We’re looking for: • Senior QA Automation Engineer — EU (remote) or San Francisco (hybrid) - Web3 experience is a must; • Staff Backend Engineer — EU (remote); • Senior/Staff Backend Engineer — San Francisco (hybrid) and Bengaluru (hybrid); • Cloud Security Engineer — Bengaluru (hybrid). Find out even more -> https://lnkd.in/dk2uydgd Interested? Let’s chat! #hiring #engineering #backend #web3 #crypto #qa