Alta lands $47.5 million Series A for bank-focused blockchain
The blockchain startup is pitching privacy and compliance built into financial infrastructure, with Airwallex signed on to build on its technology and Australian investors backing the round.
Alta is betting banks need a different kind of blockchain, not another network built first for crypto traders.
In a company announcement dated 10 November 2026, Alta said it had raised a $47.5 million Series A led by Index Ventures. The round brings its stated total funding to $80 million, including $32.5 million in earlier seed financing.
GV, also known as Google Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg and Capital 49 participated in the Series A, according to the release.
The pitch is financial plumbing with privacy and compliance baked in. Alta says it is building infrastructure that lets financial assets move globally and programmatically while meeting the controls regulated institutions require.
“Existing blockchains aren’t designed for the privacy and compliance requirements of global financial institutions,” co-founder and chief executive Loong Wang said in the announcement.
Alta says its architecture uses recursive zero-knowledge cryptography to keep balances, transactions, identities and compliance policies private while verifying that transactions follow the required rules. It also plans to combine instant settlement with global payments connectivity, foreign exchange and treasury management.
Those are company claims, not independently validated performance results in the supplied material. The announcement does not establish how the technology performs in live institutional deployments.
Airwallex is a key part of the story. Alta says the payments platform has chosen to build on its blockchain, connecting the two companies’ infrastructure.
Fortune’s separate report, published on 10 November 2026, adds that Alta’s seed funding was backed primarily by Airwallex. It also describes Airwallex as a distribution channel, encouraging its global customer network to use Alta for crypto transactions. That account does not provide customer adoption figures.
According to Fortune, Alta has 25 employees and offices in San Francisco and Melbourne. The publication reports that the business recently changed its name from Metal and was founded by Wang and former Meta executive Catherine Porter. Alta’s announcement identifies Porter as its president.
The competitive backdrop is already crowded. Fortune points to Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche as existing blockchain options, while reporting that Airwallex rival Stripe is building crypto infrastructure through its Tempo blockchain.
Alta’s answer is to put institutional controls at the centre, including identity, authorisation and programmable compliance. Its ambitions also extend to payments made autonomously by AI agents.
The funding gives that approach fresh backing. Whether banks and other financial institutions adopt it at scale remains the test ahead.