Former a16z cryptocurrency investor Sam Broner has raised $10 million to launch Better Money Company, a startup aiming to become a clearing house for USD stablecoins in response to the new US federal GENIUS legislation. Broner, who co-founded the company in November with his college friend Adam Zuckerman, a former Latham & Watkins lawyer and later general counsel at Eigen Labs, told Fortune that the goal was to “make stablecoins work like money” by giving institutions a single, low-cost place to exchange between different compliant tokens. “Stablecoins aren’t just the future, they’re better money for today,” Broner previously said at the Proof of Talk 2025 conference, arguing that the asset class is already being used as working capital and settlement cash across the crypto market.
The $10 million seed round was led by Broner’s former company a16z Crypto, with participation from early stage investors Box Group and Sunflower Capital. Fortune reports that angel backers include Circle co-founder Sean Neville and former Microsoft strategy chief Charlie Songhurst, suggesting that both stablecoin insiders and Web2 veterans see opportunity in regulated plumbing rather than new token issuance. BetterMoney is hiring engineers in New York with salaries between $175,000 and $225,000, according to job postings reviewed by Indeed, which describes the company as “building a stablecoin clearinghouse to make stablecoins work like money.”
Better Money has already secured commitments from multiple issuers, including Paxos, Stripe’s bridge division, and MoonPay, and will initially only handle payment tokens that meet the requirements of the Guidance and Establishment of National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, Broner said. According to law firm Morgan Lewis, the GENIUS Act creates a dual licensing regime for fiat-backed stablecoin issuers, forces issuers with more than $50 billion in outstanding assets to disclose monthly reserves and annual audited financials, and authorizes the U.S. Treasury to declare non-compliance with foreign regimes. Within that framework, Better Money plans to support all “signed and valid” GENIUS-compliant dollar tokens, while explicitly excluding Tether’s global token. $USDT product.
Tether has instead launched USAT, a separate dollar-pegged token “aligned to America’s new federal guidelines” and issued through federally chartered banks. The company says it is designed to operate in close compliance with the rules of the GENIUS Act. Fortune notes that USAT will be supported by Better Money and will be part of the initial roster alongside tokens from Paxos and other regulated issuers. $USDT “For now” it remains off-platform. Broner told the publication that the clearing house is focused on “low-cost, high-throughput swaps” for institutional clients and expects to begin operating the product “in the coming weeks” once technical integration and legal opinion are finalized.
Broner spent more than two years at a16z crypto focused on investing in stablecoins and payments, including researching how “liquidity, sovereignty, and trust” turn tokens into everyday money. Zuckerman, meanwhile, worked on early GENIUS Act analysis at Latham & Watkins before moving to Eigen Labs, giving Better Money a founding team with expertise in both policy and infrastructure.
In a previous crypto.news article on the GENIUS Act, lawyers argued that its reserve, audit and licensing requirements will likely drive global liquidity towards a narrower set of dollar tokens that can meet bank-style standards. Another article on how Amazon, Walmart and Ant Group plan to “weaponize” stablecoins highlighted the possibility that Big Tech companies may have to issue their dollar tokens through regulated intermediaries rather than directly, especially under provisions restricting non-financial publicly traded companies from issuing payment coins without unanimous approval from a Federal Review Board. A third article on South Korea’s competition to issue bank-backed stablecoins suggests that as countries converge on similar rules, neutral clearing houses like Better Money could become the preferred means for exchanges, fintechs, and companies to move between local and USD rails without touching non-compliant tokens.
