How Zach Abrams Built Bridge: The Stablecoin API Stripe Bought for $1.1B

TL;DR: Bridge is stablecoin infrastructure — a Stripe-style API that lets any developer move a dollar into a stablecoin, across chains, and back out into local currency, without building wallets, mint-and-burn plumbing or gas management. It was founded in March 2022 by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu. On October 21, 2024, Stripe announced it was acquiring Bridge for $1.1 billion — its largest acquisition ever — and the deal closed on February 4, 2025. The uncomfortable part of the story: Zach raised $8 million in April 2022, abandoned the idea he'd raised on in May, spent four months with no product, launched in the same week SVB collapsed and USDC broke its peg, and had exactly one customer carrying the business for the first few months.

He told it on The Product Market Fit Show before the deal had even closed.

What does Bridge do?

Bridge abstracts away the crypto so developers can use stablecoins as plumbing. Before it existed, Zach's team discovered the basic action was disproportionately hard:

"We realized there was no clean way for a developer like a Stripe, effectively a Stripe-style API -for a developer to come in and take a dollar and convert it into a stable coin, just that basic action, it required you to spin up wallets to deal with this mint burn infrastructure to - it required a ton of- you have to build up your own gas management." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

The use case that actually took off wasn't the one they designed for. It was cross-border payments — and a customer taught it to them:

"So, you can do a local payment in the US. So you take a wire from a bank account, convert it into a stablecoin, send the stablecoin over to a partner in Mexico, convert it into pesos, and do a local payment in Mexico. So the stable coin replaces a swift rail." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"So Swift generally settles in T plus one, T plus two with a stable coin. You could do a US to Mexico payment in minutes without holding capital in either country." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

The entire company rested on two beliefs, which is why it survived a year of the crypto market imploding:

"It was like, do you think stable coins are gonna be important and do you think there will be many? And, if you believe those two things to be true, then Bridge is a valuable company." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

Who founded Bridge?

Bridge was founded by Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, who had been building together since 2011. Their first company was acquired by Square, where Zach then ran product teams. He joined Coinbase in 2017 and ran its consumer business, then became Chief Product Officer at Brex — and left at the end of 2021, not for an idea, but because he was finished:

"We had basically started this comp- Sean and I started the company in like 2011. We sold that company to Square, and then I ran a bunch of product teams at Square, then ran the consumer business at Coinbase, then did this at Brex. It was just like a very, very intense long run." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"I had just burnt out. I had just lost steam, and I was no longer as effective at the job. I didn't have it in me to push the same way I did early on." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

He skied, took months off, and only in December and January started talking to Sean twice a week, then three times a week. By March 2022 they started the company.

Notably, they didn't start it in the Bay Area. Zach was in Austin and London — and when asked for his single most differentiated piece of advice, that's what he named. More on that below.

How much did Bridge raise, and what was it acquired for?

• Seed — about $8 million, closed April 2022. Raised on an NFT-purchasing idea they abandoned in May.
• Series A — $20 million from Sequoia, December 2023. Zach says they raised "a little bit more" from another investor early the following year.
• Acquisition — $1.1 billion by Stripe. Announced October 21, 2024; closed February 4, 2025. It was Stripe's largest acquisition and, at the time, the largest acquisition in crypto.

Key stat: roughly $28 million raised in total, against a $1.1 billion exit, two and a half years after Zach left his job.

At the time of the interview, the company was about 54 people.

Where Bridge sits in 2026: Stripe has built its stablecoin strategy around it. Open Issuance, announced in September 2025, lets any business launch a custom stablecoin, with reserves managed by BlackRock, Fidelity and Superstate, and early customers including Phantom, Hyperliquid and ConsenSys (MetaMask). Zach Abrams is now founding CEO of Open Standard, the consortium that unveiled Open USD on June 30, 2026 — a dollar stablecoin backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and more than 140 firms.

The pivot: giving up on the idea one month after the round closed

Bridge's first idea was converting bank funds into stablecoins to buy NFTs. The market for it evaporated and got crowded at the same time.

"We raised in April, so we closed the route in April." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"So that's how long idea 1 lasted" — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"We raised about 8 million. And so I felt like a complete moron." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"I literally thought I was gonna burn my career to the ground." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

The hardest part wasn't the market. It was that he lost conviction before his co-founder did — and had no replacement idea to offer.

"So I was like, Hey Sean, I've lost confidence in this idea, and I also don't know what we wanna do." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

It took two or three weeks to get aligned. Then he called an investor to confess, and got an answer that reset his entire model of what investors were thinking:

"And Mark, - he took a beat. And he was like, I didn't think that idea was gonna work anyway" — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"Because my perception of what people were thinking was so wildly dislocated from what they were actually thinking. And that was quite liberating." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

The same thing happened with Dan, their first engineer, who had been pitched on an idea that no longer existed by the time he started: "Dan was like, this is amazing. This is what I signed up for."

The exploration itself was structured, and produced one hard conclusion within a week:

"One of our realizations was that any crypto product that is like sold to crypto companies is unlikely to be successful. That was like my biggest takeaway. Like they definitely have problems and there are things that you could build to solve problems for, but the market is tiny." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

That TAM constraint is what forced them toward infrastructure with a non-crypto audience. In September 2022, the pieces snapped together:

"As soon as those pieces kind of clicked together in our head, it was one of those where it was like, once it's seen, it can't be unseen." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

If you're mid-pivot, when to pivot vs. persevere and product-market fit after a pivot collect this same decision across many episodes.

Why market collapse made Bridge stronger

Terra Luna, FTX, Silvergate, Signature, SVB. Bridge's entire first year was other companies dying. Zach's read on it is counterintuitive and worth internalizing:

"No, it actually made us more excited. Every time one of these bank failures, one of these situations happened, it became harder to build what we were building. And our thesis was unchanged." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"So essentially what was happening was all this disruption in the market was making the moat around our business bigger." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

FTX had quietly useful APIs for converting between stablecoins — meaning any competitor could have used them too. When FTX died, so did that shortcut. When five banks wanted to work with everyone, banking access wasn't an advantage; when no bank would work with anyone and Bridge found one, it was. Being unfashionable was itself protective:

"If you show me a person who's building something in crypto, living in San Francisco and was working on it in 2023, I will guarantee you that they are a true believer and probably excellent be because it just requires a level of conviction in the space, you can't get it externally." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

One event genuinely threatened the thesis, and it landed on launch week:

"The one thing that was truly existential was when SVB went under and USDC deep pegged because, and that was the week that we launched." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

(De-pegged.)

"It was like, oh crap, if this thing does not recover its value by Monday, then stable coins might never exist again in a real way in the US and there might be nothing here." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

USDC recovered over the weekend. Developers came back.

The one customer that made Bridge real

Bridge moved its first dollar in late March 2023. Its two chosen design partners, Maltese and General Galactic, didn't scale the way anyone hoped — Zach's own verdict: "we did not do a great job there." The distribution channel was his Twitter account, which had about 2,000 followers.

"At the time I had like 2000 Twitter followers, so like not a lot of people, but I was like, I don't know how else to tell people that our product exists." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

One of those tweets brought in Zulu, run by a Colombian founder named Esteban, who wanted stablecoins for cross-border payments.

"And I was like, sure, I have no idea what you're building and like why this is interesting to you, but like, Godspeed, let's work out a contract and like let's onboard you. And our first couple months were basically just Zulu. That was it, that was our business. Was like one customer." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

Zulu grew fast and taught Bridge what its own product was for. Then Bitso, the largest exchange in Latin America, signed and launched in September 2023, and the business inflected.

Key stat: from that point Bridge grew "somewhere between 20 and 50% a month," consistently, as Zach shared on the show — for roughly a year, until the acquisition.

And he refuses to let anyone read that as destiny:

"Maybe it feels like Bridge was inevitable in some ways or like they think our success is inevitable." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

If Zulu hadn't signed, he points out, Bridge would have launched into four months of essentially zero volume — right after the de-peg — and nobody knows what that does to a four-person team's morale.

Key lessons from Zach Abrams's playbook

1. Your investors are less fragile than you imagine. He was not sleeping over letting people down; the investor's actual position was that he'd expected a year in the maze. Ask before you spiral. 2. Check the TAM of your buyer, not just your problem. Selling crypto tools to crypto companies fails on market size even when the pain is real. See product-market fit for API companies. 3. Compress the thesis to two questions. "Are stablecoins important?" and "will there be many?" — a thesis short enough to re-answer during every crisis is a thesis that survives crises. 4. Chaos in your market can widen your moat. Every failure removed a shortcut a competitor could have used. Related: startup platform risk. 5. Brute-force luck. This is the line to take away:

"I think like people talk about the grind of a startup and like to me the grind of a startup is just doing an enormous number of low probability things to, over time, accumulate enough of those, such that there's a decent probability of some sort of success." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

"You just have to brute force luck." — Zach Abrams, Bridge

6. Start away from the noise. Asked for advice nobody else would give, he pointed at geography — Austin and London, not San Francisco or New York:

"As you're starting a company, especially in the early phases, there is an immense desire to benchmark yourself versus everyone else. And there's always gonna be someone who's growing faster, who's in a hotter space, who's more popular than you are or what have you. But the most important thing that we found for our company is building real first principles, conviction and the thing that you are building" — Zach Abrams, Bridge

On the exit itself, he's honest that it was not the clean triumph outsiders assume — "many, many, many sleepless nights," and mixed emotions even after the announcement. If you're facing one, see what to do with a startup acquisition offer.

Listen to the full interview: Stripe bought his startup for $1.1B — just 2.5 years after he quit his job | Zach Abrams, Co-Founder of Bridge

FAQ: Bridge

Q: What is Bridge? A: Bridge is a stablecoin infrastructure company. Its APIs let developers and businesses move, store, issue and spend stablecoins — converting dollars into stablecoins and back into local currency — without building crypto plumbing themselves. Cross-border payments became its largest use case.

Q: Who founded Bridge? A: Zach Abrams and Sean Yu, who had worked together since 2011. Zach previously sold a company to Square, ran product teams there, ran the consumer business at Coinbase, and was Chief Product Officer at Brex.

Q: How much did Stripe pay for Bridge? A: $1.1 billion. Stripe announced the acquisition on October 21, 2024 and completed it on February 4, 2025. It was Stripe's largest acquisition.

Q: How much funding did Bridge raise before the acquisition? A: About $8 million in its April 2022 seed round and $20 million in a December 2023 Series A led by Sequoia, plus a small additional amount in early 2024.

Q: What is Zach Abrams doing now? A: He is founding CEO of Open Standard, the consortium that unveiled Open USD on June 30, 2026 — a dollar stablecoin backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock and more than 140 firms.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Zach Abrams, Co-Founder of Bridge — how a company that pivoted one month after its seed round, launched during the USDC de-peg, and ran on a single customer became Stripe's $1.1B stablecoin bet.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: August 2026