Astra Raises $10M from Nyca Partners to Scale the Payments Cloud
San Francisco, CA – February 2026
We’re excited to announce that Astra has secured a $10 million strategic investment from Nyca Partners.
This is a significant moment for us. Nyca typically focuses on earlier-stage companies with smaller check sizes, so their conviction speaks volumes. Their General Partner, Hans Morris, previously served as President of Visa – they know exactly what world-class payments infrastructure looks like.
Today, we’re also introducing the platform architecture that delivers the performance and value enterprises need to be successful with instant payments: the Payments Cloud.
Why the World Needs a Payments Cloud
For decades, money moved in batches. ACH files cleared overnight. Payroll hit on Fridays. Deposits are funded in days. Like everything in our modern digital lives, that is evolving into instant experiences and payments.
But building the infrastructure to power instant payments is brutally hard. Real-time money movement means real-time fraud, real-time ledger updates, and real-time reconciliation across a patchwork of rails – Visa Direct, Mastercard Move, RTP, FedNow, ACH, Stablecoins – each with unique technical requirements and settlement mechanics. Most engineering teams simply aren’t equipped to solve it and to support the workflows the rest of their business needs to succeed.
That’s the gap Astra is closing through our Payments Cloud platform architecture. We’ve reimagined payments infrastructure from the ground up. Astra is a vertically integrated platform that delivers the workflows and performance enterprises need to launch and scale products with embedded instant payments. Legacy payments gateways are thin layers of technology, require siloed processes, and weren’t built for how software businesses operate today.
What the Payments Cloud Does
The Payments Cloud gives companies a flexible, scalable platform to build, manage, and scale their entire payments operation.
We collapse an entire payments stack into a single, unified API: core payment processing, intelligent routing across instant and legacy rails, plus integrated risk, compliance, fraud, and treasury workflows. Customers launch in weeks instead of quarters. They get real-time money movement without managing bank relationships, FBO accounts, or reconciliation logic.
The value the Payments Cloud delivers to industry-leading enterprises like Blend, Webull, and SpotOn has a multiplier effect on their business. Our customers are able to unlock massive ROI across use cases, from 37% increase in new account openings to beating industry standard fraud rates by 7x.
Instant capabilities are no longer nice-to-have. Velocity creates value and enabling real-time payments is the difference between winning and losing customers. The Payments Cloud is the infrastructure standard to ensure success at scale.
Why Nyca
What makes this partnership special isn’t just the capital. Nyca brings decades of payments expertise at the exact moment we’re scaling the Payments Cloud.
Their conviction in Astra didn’t start in a pitch meeting – it started when they noticed their own portfolio companies kept choosing us. Sardine, the fraud prevention platform, uses Astra as its payment service provider for US bank pay-ins and payouts. Treasury Prime, the embedded banking infrastructure company, selected Astra over competitors to power push-to-card payments for its fintech customers.
In both cases, the same pattern emerged: we won on product depth, implementation speed, and turnkey simplicity. When the companies Nyca backs – companies with deep payments expertise and high standards – independently reach the same conclusion, that means something.
What’s Next
We are growing fast, and just getting started. This investment accelerates our mission to rebuild payments infrastructure for the real-time economy.
The future of payments isn’t about moving money faster – it’s about unlocking entirely new business models that are only possible when capital flows at the speed of decisions. That’s what the Payments Cloud enables.
We are grateful to the Nyca team for believing in our vision, and to our incredible team who make it all possible. Let’s go!
About Astra
Astra is the Payments Cloud – a fast-growing payments infrastructure company enabling businesses to build and scale modern payment operations with unprecedented speed and flexibility.
About Nyca Partners
Nyca Partners is a venture capital firm focused on financial services technology. Founded by former senior executives from Visa, Goldman Sachs, and leading financial institutions, Nyca brings deep domain expertise and an extensive network of industry relationships to support its portfolio companies.