Summary
- Former a16z crypto investor Sam Broner has co-founded The Better Money Company, raising $10M in seed funding to build a stablecoin clearinghouse.
- The round was led by a16z crypto with backing from BoxGroup, Sunflower Capital and angels including Circle co-founder Sean Neville and ex-Microsoft exec Charlie Songhurst.finance.
- Better Money plans to support GENIUS Act-compliant dollar tokens such as Paxos and Stripe’s Bridge, while excluding USDT but not its U.S. sibling USAT.
Former a16z crypto investor Sam Broner has raised $10 million to launch The Better Money Company, a startup aiming to become a clearinghouse for U.S. dollar stablecoins in the wake of America’s new federal GENIUS Act regime. Broner co-founded the company in November with college friend Adam Zuckerman, a former Latham & Watkins attorney who later served as general counsel at Eigen Labs, and told Fortune that the goal is to “make stablecoins move like money” by giving institutions a single, low-cost venue to swap between different compliant tokens. “Stablecoins aren’t just the future, they’re better money today,” Broner said previously at the Proof of Talk 2025 conference, arguing that the asset class is already used as working capital and settlement cash across crypto markets.
The $10 million seed round was led by Broner’s former firm a16z crypto, with participation from early-stage investors BoxGroup and Sunflower Capital. Fortune reports that angel backers include Circle co-founder Sean Neville and former Microsoft strategy chief Charlie Songhurst, signaling that both stablecoin insiders and Web2 veterans see an opportunity in regulated plumbing rather than issuing new tokens. Job listings reviewed by Indeed show Better Money hiring engineers in New York at salaries between $175,000 and $225,000, describing the company as “building a stablecoin clearinghouse to make stablecoins move like money.”
Broner says Better Money has already secured commitments from several issuers – including Paxos, Stripe’s Bridge unit and MoonPay – and will initially handle only payment tokens that meet the requirements of the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. According to law firm Morgan Lewis, the GENIUS Act creates a dual licensing regime for fiat-backed stablecoin issuers, forces monthly disclosure of reserves and annual audited financials for issuers with more than $50 billion outstanding, and gives the U.S. Treasury power to declare foreign regimes non‑compliant. Within that framework, Better Money plans to support all “signed and effective” GENIUS‑compliant dollar tokens, while explicitly excluding Tether’s global USDT product.
Tether has instead launched USAT, a separate dollar-pegged token “tailored for the new federal guidelines in America” and issued through a federally chartered bank, which the company says is engineered to operate squarely inside GENIUS Act rules. Fortune notes that USAT will be supported on Better Money, making it part of the initial roster alongside tokens from Paxos and other regulated issuers, while USDT remains outside the platform “for now.” Broner told the magazine that the clearinghouse will focus on “low-cost, high-throughput swaps” for institutional clients, with the product expected to go live “in the coming weeks” once technical integrations and legal opinions are finalized.
Broner spent more than two years at a16z crypto focusing on stablecoin and payments investments, including research on how “liquidity, sovereignty and credit” would turn tokens into everyday money. Zuckerman, meanwhile, worked on early GENIUS Act analyses at Latham & Watkins before moving into Eigen Labs, giving Better Money a founder team steeped in both policy and infrastructure.
In a previous crypto.news story on the GENIUS Act, lawyers argued that its reserve, audit and licensing requirements were likely to push global liquidity toward a narrower set of dollar tokens that can meet bank‑style standards. Another story on how Amazon, Walmart and Ant Group plan to “weaponize stablecoins” highlighted how Big Tech firms may have to route their own dollar tokens through regulated intermediaries rather than issue them directly, especially under sections that restrict non‑financial public companies from launching payment coins without unanimous approval from a federal review panel. A third story on South Korea’s race to issue bank‑backed stablecoins suggested that, as jurisdictions converge on similar rules, neutral clearinghouses like Better Money could become the preferred way for exchanges, fintechs and corporates to move between local and U.S. dollar rails without touching non‑compliant tokens.
