OpenUSDC
About

A small team building open infrastructure for the agent economy.

OpenUSDC is a remote-first company headquartered nowhere. We are five engineers and one researcher, working across six time zones, building the payment substrate we wanted to use ourselves.

Why we exist

Money for agents shouldn't take ten weeks of paperwork.

In late 2025 we were building a research agent and noticed the same problem on every integration: the model was ready, the API was ready, the procurement department was not. By the time the agent could actually pay for the data it needed, the use case had moved on.

The right answer felt obvious in retrospect: make every API priced, make every agent able to pay, and let the whole thing settle in stablecoin. The standards work Coinbase had started on x402 made the wire format obvious. We sat down to build the reference gateway and haven't looked up since.

We're keeping the company small on purpose. The whole point of open infrastructure is that it survives any one company. Our job is to ship excellent middleware, document it honestly, and stay out of the way of the builders.

Funding

$7.4M seed round (2026)

Led by Northstar Ventures, with participation from Loop Capital, Aperture Fund, and a coalition of operators-turned-angels from Stripe, Cloudflare, and Coinbase. We're well-capitalized for the next 30 months at our current burn.

Where we are
  • London
  • Brooklyn
  • Mexico City
  • Toulouse
  • Tokyo
  • Cape Town (open desk)
How we work

Four operating principles.

Open by default

The gateway, the SDKs, and the audit reports are open source. Cloud is optional and wire-compatible with self-host.

Small surface area

We add a primitive when we have to and remove one whenever we can. Five headers is two too many; we keep looking.

Boring infrastructure

Payments software should be impossible to be surprised by. Receipts are signed. Retries are idempotent. The wire format is versioned.

Remote first, async first

We hire from anywhere. We default to writing things down. Meetings are short, and almost always optional.

Team

The humans behind the gateway.

We're always looking for engineers who like protocol design, payments, or open-source stewardship. Reach us at jobs@openusdc.ai — every role is remote.

Want to talk? We answer email.

Whether you're building, hiring, investing, regulating, or writing — we'd love to hear from you. Replies typically take a day, sometimes two.

Get in touchRead our writing