Jesse Hemson-Struthers, Donald Jackson and Chris Harmse founded BVNK in London in 2021. Just 15 months ago, the company raised its Series B at a $750 million valuation. Mastercard is paying 2.4 times that. Coinbase was reportedly in talks for a roughly $2 billion deal that fell through before Mastercard stepped in.

The founders are all South African. Hemson-Struthers grew up between the UK and South Africa, studied at UCT, and had already exited twice — selling an e-commerce company to Naspers in 2014 and a gaming technology company to Sportradar in 2017. Jackson previously founded Cue, a customer engagement platform, and Verity, a fraud reduction service. Harmse is a CFA charterholder and former FX trader who was a partner at a macro and crypto fund before co-founding BVNK.

The founding team's previous venture was Coindirect, a consumer crypto exchange. The pivot to BVNK came from a specific insight: the real value in crypto wasn't helping people buy and sell Bitcoin. It was building the infrastructure that lets businesses move stablecoins across borders at scale.

BVNK is an enterprise-grade platform that enables companies to send, receive, and hold stablecoins while bridging them to traditional banking rails. The company processes over $30 billion in annualised stablecoin volume across more than 130 countries. Its investor list reads like a who's who of global finance: Tiger Global, Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Visa Ventures, and Citi Ventures all backed the company.

The commercial traction was already significant before the Mastercard deal. In January 2026, BVNK announced it would power Visa Direct, Visa's $1.7 trillion real-time payments network, with stablecoin settlement. Last month, the company secured its CASP licence from the Malta Financial Services Authority, authorising it to offer digital asset services across all EEA member states.

Mastercard isn't buying a crypto company. It's buying a modern payment network that connects stablecoins to traditional financial infrastructure.

As stablecoins scale — transaction volume hit at least $350 billion in 2025 — every major financial institution and fintech will need to offer digital currency services. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert was explicit about this, stating that the company expects most financial institutions and fintechs to eventually provide digital currency services and wants to support them with a compliant, interoperable offering.

BVNK gives Mastercard the plumbing to do that: the blockchain integrations, the banking connections, the regulatory licences across multiple jurisdictions, and the orchestration layer that routes transactions between fiat and stablecoins. Building that from scratch would take years. Buying BVNK gets Mastercard there immediately.

Hemson-Struthers said the deal brings together complementary capabilities to deliver the future of money movement. The transaction is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

The BVNK path (serial exits, a strategic pivot, building infrastructure rather than consumer products, headquartering in London for global reach, and securing regulatory licences across multiple jurisdictions) is a specific playbook, not a generic success story.

The founders used the experience and capital from previous exits to build something larger. They moved away from the consumer crypto hype cycle and into enterprise infrastructure, solving the complex, unglamorous problem of how businesses move money across borders. And by establishing BVNK in London and securing European regulatory approvals, they made the company an easy acquisition target for a global buyer.

The result is the largest exit by South African founders in the fintech space, and evidence that local founders can build companies that become indispensable to the world's biggest financial networks.

This news first appeared in our 20 March ‘26 newsletter on Gooi organic waste removal.

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