Money moves across banks, payment processors, compliance systems, and ledgers in seconds. Finding out why a payment failed or where it got stuck can take hours or days. Former Rapyd executives believe they have a fix for that problem.
AI startup Cordant emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $8 million in seed funding co-led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT. The startup has built what it calls a command center for financial institutions, giving banks, fintechs, and payments companies a single operational view across the systems they already use without replacing existing infrastructure or moving customer funds.
The funding will support product development, expand deployments with early customers, and move the platform into production following private beta.
The startup was founded by Eric Rosenthal, Lior Levitt, Sagi Ittah, and Juan Jose Huezo, who previously helped scale Rapyd’s global payments infrastructure across more than 50 countries and over 100 partner integrations. Their experience exposed a recurring challenge across the industry. Payment data often lives in separate systems that rarely share the same view of a transaction.
That creates blind spots when payments fail, settlement is delayed, or compliance teams need to investigate an issue. Operations teams frequently end up piecing together logs, spreadsheets, and reports from multiple vendors before they can determine what happened.
Cordant aims to remove that manual work by collecting operational signals from payment rails, bank accounts, ledgers, compliance platforms, treasury systems, and risk tools, then organizing them into a shared event model. The platform gives teams a real-time record of how transactions move across systems, where exceptions occur, and whether internal controls were followed.
“We built the layer that was missing; one that shows how a transaction moved across all the systems involved or where the hand-off across systems and teams breaks down. That is the gap Cordant closes,” said Eric Rosenthal, CEO and co-founder of Cordant.
Cordant emerges from stealth with $8M to simplify payment operations for banks and fintechs
The timing reflects a broader shift across financial services. Banks and fintech companies continue to add real-time payment networks, digital assets, stablecoins, and AI-powered workflows. Each new integration introduces another source of operational data, making it harder for compliance, treasury, and operations teams to maintain a consistent view across their environment.
Rosenthal believes visibility has become a prerequisite before financial institutions can safely automate regulated workflows.
“Everyone wants to put AI into payments and back-office workflows,” Rosenthal said. “But institutions cannot automate responsibly if they cannot see or explain it. Context has to come before automation.”
Cordant says it developed the platform alongside 11 design partners spanning banking, embedded finance, cross-border payments, stablecoins, and digital assets. Those partners include Bitso and Paxos, both investors in the company.
“Bitso is building hybrid finance, bringing traditional and digital money into one system. Moving money across all of that is hard, and even with strong tooling of our own, the next hard problem is seeing the full route a payment takes and whether each step honors the rules meant to govern it,” said Imran Ahmad, COO at Bitso.
Industry veterans see the same challenge as payment ecosystems grow more connected.
“Every institution moving money today is stitching together a patchwork of rails, ledgers, compliance systems and rules, and the real risk almost always lives in the handoffs between these tools,” said Oivind Lorentzen, partner at Oak HC/FT. “Eric and the Cordant team spent years building and scaling the infrastructure at Rapyd, so they understand firsthand where visibility breaks down and what it takes to fix it.”
Along with Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, the seed round attracted backing from Bankless VC, FJ Labs, SignalFire, Quona, Next Stage, Selah Ventures, Flatironx, Nascent Ventures, Silvercircle Ventures, and Generative Ventures.
For Cordant, the opportunity extends beyond tracking payments. The founders are betting that financial institutions will need a common operational layer that connects fragmented infrastructure before AI can take on more responsibility inside regulated environments.
