Stablecoin Card Issuer Rain Buys Merchant Wallet Startup Ansa

Rain acquired Ansa, a startup whose software lets merchants run their own branded prepaid wallets, the stablecoin card issuer announced.

The purchase adds a product built on fiat. Ansa's wallets hold dollar balances that customers load in advance and spend at the brand that issued them, and neither company described a stablecoin leg in the technology Rain bought. Rain's plan is to pair those balances with its own Visa and Mastercard issuing so a prefunded balance can spend outside the merchant that sold it, and to run wallets, rewards and stablecoins off one platform.

Ansa was founded in 2022 by Sophia Goldberg, who spent several years at Adyen managing global accounts and product, and JT Cho, previously an engineer at Affirm. It emerged from stealth in April 2023 with $5.4 million led by Bain Capital Ventures, then raised a $14 million Series A led by Renegade Partners in April 2024, for $19.4 million in total disclosed funding. Goldberg becomes Rain's head of payments.

The Starbucks Wallet Pitch

"Every great merchant or consumer brand eventually wants their own version of the Starbucks wallet, but very few have the infrastructure to pull it off," Goldberg said in Rain's announcement.

Ansa sold that infrastructure as white-label APIs and mobile SDKs, plus an incentive engine that attaches expiration dates to rewards to pull customers back sooner. Its named customers include Washington, D.C. coffee chain Compass Coffee and music gear marketplace Reverb. Compass reported a 30% increase in visits from customers who adopted the wallet, according to Ansa's case study.

Rain co-founder and Chief Executive Farooq Malik announced the deal on X on Tuesday morning, writing that the combined product is aimed at "sports teams, venues, hotels, cruise lines, and more."

A Mastercard Side Door

The technical claim behind the deal is that Ansa found a way to spend a closed-loop balance on hardware merchants already own. Rain says Ansa "struck a truly novel arrangement with Mastercard" letting a stored balance spend in-store over Mastercard's rails at an existing terminal, while online and in-app transactions authorize against Ansa's API instead of a card network.

Neither company has published the mechanics, and Mastercard has not described the arrangement publicly. Ansa's own September 2024 launch release for Ansa Anywhere, the in-store product, described it as tap-to-pay through Apple Pay and Google Pay and "POS- and PSP-agnostic," and did not mention Mastercard.

Uptop Came First

This is Rain's second acquisition in nine months. In November 2025 it bought Uptop, a card-linked rewards platform now running fan programs for the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Detroit Pistons and LSU athletics, according to Rain. That deal followed the company's $58 million Series B led by Sapphire Ventures.

Rain raised $250 million in a Series C led by ICONIQ on January 9 at a $1.95 billion valuation, bringing total funding above $338 million. The company said then that it works with more than 200 partners and runs more than $3 billion in annualized transactions, with its active card base up 30 times over the prior year. Last week it launched Stablecard with Western Union in 37 markets, a Visa card that spends the remittance company's USDPT stablecoin.

Programmable Balances For Agents

Rain tied the acquisition to agentic commerce, arguing that a stored value balance governed by rules on who can spend it, where and until when is the same primitive as the scoped cards it sells for AI agents. Goldberg will work on that product, the company said, without giving a timeline.

Card networks have been building toward the same use case. Mastercard opened its card rails to AI agents in June, with 31 crypto and fintech launch partners.