Atum, a San Francisco-based fintech company building an open payments network for global money movement, emerged from stealth on September 22, 2026, with $13.5 million in funding. The company said the financing came from Variant, PayPal Ventures, Abstract Ventures, Road Capital, Mirana Ventures, First Commit and Credibly Neutral, with Charlie Songhurst named as a strategic advisor.
Founded by CEO Pete Cooling, Atum provides a coordination layer connecting payment companies, developers and enterprises. The network is designed to handle authorization, routing and confirmation without issuing its own currency, operating a blockchain, favouring a particular payment rail or taking custody of customer funds.
Integrators, developers and applications can submit payment requests through Atum, while independent settlement providers compete to fulfil transactions across supported blockchains and stablecoins. The company says the network includes native authorization, reversible payments and identity functionality.
Atum targets card issuers and acquirers, payment service providers, card networks, stablecoin orchestrators, wallets, fintech companies and enterprises. It also supports agentic payments through protocols including x402 and MPP. Cooling previously led Visa’s crypto product team and represented Visa at the Linux Foundation’s OpenWallet Foundation.
