ARCHITECT SUCCESSES

SEE ALL
Coinme Acquired by Polygon Labs to Build its Open Money Stack
Coinme Acquired by Polygon Labs to Build its Open Money Stack

Transaction Overview
On January 13th, 2026, Polygon Labs announced it intends to acquire Coinme, a regulated crypto-as-a-service provider. Simultaneously, Polygon also announced the acquisition of Sequence, enabling payment flows across blockchain networks. Both acquisitions help build a fully integrated, rules-compliant stablecoin payments system – Poygon’s Open Money Stack.

Target: Coinme
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Seattle, Coinme is a U.S.-regulated digital asset payments company offering crypto-as-a-service and stablecoin and crypto payment infrastructure for enterprises, fintechs, wallets, and payment applications.

Coinme is licensed and operates in 48 U.S. states, as well as Puerto Rico, and has built systems designed to handle fiat-to-crypto and stablecoin payments at scale while meeting U.S. regulatory requirements.

Coinme provides capabilities that partners integrate into their products. These capabilities, delivered as a set of APIs or SDKs, include KYC, payments by debit card, bank transfer, or cash, converting between fiat and crypto, trading, and custody, so partners can offer end-to-end crypto and stablecoin features embedded in their own applications.

Coinme also supports a large cash-to-crypto network through partnerships, providing the software and compliance layer that enables cash on-ramps and off-ramps at 50,000+ locations across the U.S.

Coinme serves more than one million users and has processed more than $1.3 billion in total transactions since it launched. Its enterprise customers include Coinstar, Exodus, Mercuryo, Baanx, and Breeze.

Coinme was co-founded by CEO Neil Bergquist and has raised $41M in equity funding from Pantera, Digital Currency Group, Coinstar, Circle, and MoneyGram.

Coinme competitors include: ZeroHash, MoonPay, Bridge | Stripe, Banxa | OSL, and Paxos.

Buyer: Polygon Labs
Polygon was founded in 2017 as Matic Network and is actively undergoing an evolution in its product offering. Polygon Labs, formed in 2023, is responsible for supporting the development of the Polygon ecosystem, with a focus on fast, low-cost blockchain infrastructure for payments.

Polygon is now building the Open Money Stack, an integrated set of services designed to move money instantly and reliably, globally. It combines blockchain settlement on the Polygon network with core payment components like wallets, stablecoin integrations, cross-chain connectivity, and compliance tooling, to keep funds on-chain so they can be used across on-chain financial applications.

To make this work across many different blockchains, Polygon Labs is building AggLayer, a settlement layer meant to help different blockchains connect and exchange value with each other quickly and at low cost, reducing the need for separate, disconnected systems.

Polygon is a listed token with a current fully diluted value of $1.6B. Polygonscan shows more than 6.2 billion total transactions on Polygon. Polygon’s website also points to scale indicators like billions of dollars of stablecoins on the network, millions of transactions per day on average, and monthly payment volume, and describes Polygon as infrastructure that can support “trillions” of value moving through it.

The company was co-founded by Jaynti Kanani, Sandeep Nailwal, Mihailo Bjelic, and Anurag Arjun, and is currently led by CEO Marc Boiron, who was appointed in 2023.

Historically, in 2021, Polygon acquired zero-knowledge cryptography companies Mir and Hermez for $400M and $250M, respectively, but these are no longer aligned with the company’s Open Money Stack vision.

Transaction Parameters
Polygon Labs is acquiring Coinme for an undisclosed amount. In combination with another acquisition, Sequence, simultaneously announced by Polygon today. The combined acquisition value is around $250M. This marks one of the first examples of a protocol acquiring an operating business. The Coinme transaction is expected to close in Q2 2026.

Architect Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor to Coinme.

Notable comparable transactions include OSL | Banxa for $62M (M&A Alert), Nuvei | Simplex for $250M (M&A Alert), Ripple | Rail for $200M (M&A Alert), Stripe | Bridge for $1.1B (M&A Alert), MoonPay | Iron for $100M (M&A Alert), and MoonPay | Helio for $175M (M&A Alert).

Strategic Rationale
Polygon is acquiring Coinme and Sequence to move from being a settlement rail to owning the full experience of how money comes on-chain, moves on-chain, and settles back into the real world. The combination of Coinme’s licensed payments offering with Sequence’s wallet and payments orchestration stack gives Polygon an end‑to‑end, regulated crypto payments platform that spans physical kiosks, embedded wallets, and cross‑chain routing.

On Day 1, Polygon can take this integrated “crypto‑as‑a‑service” solution to banks, PSPs, neobanks, and fintechs who want compliant, turnkey stablecoin and token payments without building their own licensing, infrastructure, or user experience.

Architect Partners’ Observations
This acquisition(s) underscores a broader inflection point in the blockchain protocol market: technological performance and scalability alone will not win. The integration of real-world rails and the ability to deliver end-to-end value for mainstream users are becoming table stakes. As the market matures, competitive advantage is shifting toward owning the commercialization layer, including regulated fiat access, compliance operations, distribution channels, partner integrations, and strong product integration.

Networks that rely entirely on third-party providers risk commoditization, margin leakage, inconsistent user experience, and strategic dependency, just as stablecoins and tokenized products begin to drive meaningful transaction volume and the corresponding revenue opportunities.
Polygon’s actions show they fully understand the importance of this approach.

Sources
Polygon Press Release
Architect Partner M&A Tracker
PitchBook

App Annie Acquires Mobile App Analytics Company Morbidia

On May 6, 2015, App Annie, a leading mobile app market data vendor, announced the acquisition of Vancouver-based competitor Mobidia. Architect Partners was the financial advisor to Mobidia on this transaction.

Mobidia offers the industry’s largest set of mobile app and network usage data. For millions of iOS and Android apps, Mobidia tracks actual usage that shows what people are actually using, rather than just downloads, which primarily show intent. For all the apps installed on over a million mobile devices, Mobidia tracks the time of day a user opens an app, how long she uses it, how much data is consumed for each use, location, the user’s carrier, handset, data plan size, network used, etc. Then Mobidia offers its clients a subscription service for app and network usage data by category and country, delivered via a web or mobile dashboard.

Mobidia tracks 3mm+ apps globally, from millions of active devices, on 800+ 3G and LTE carriers and 10,000+ public and private Wifi networks. Every month Mobidia tracks usage data from 4 billion location points in 200+ countries, including the largest markets of US, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Mobidia has 100+ data clients, including app vendors, platform and network providers such as Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Twitter, AT&T, and investment groups.

Mobidia was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Vancouver, BC. The company has 30 employees, all of whom will shift over to App Annie. Mobidia had raised $32mm in venture funding from BC Advantage Funds, Business Development Bank of Canada, Discover Capital and others.

Mobile app analytics vendors, such as Flurry, initially served developers by providing download and in-app usage data. This business has broadened considerably as product managers and marketers now use insights from app usage for product optimization and marketing. The ultimate application for this data will be in app monetization and real-time ad targeting.

In addition to the acquisitions highlighted above, there has been a major wave of investment into this sector in the past six months, including App Annie ($55mm raised on 01/13/15, $94mm raised in total), MixPanel ($65mm raised on 12/18/14, $77mm raised in total), and SimilarWeb ($15mm raised on 11/25/14, $36.3mm raised in total).

This transaction firmly underscores a recurring Architect Partners theme around the value of data and analytics.

In the fast-growing mobile app data space, customers have been pushing for actual (not estimated) app usage (not just download) data. App Annie had announced new offerings in app usage and was in the process of building out their mobile device coverage. Although smaller in revenues, Mobidia has been known as the gold standard in actual app and network usage data, with three years of data from over 200 countries, and App Annie’s acquisition was the result of a clear make-versus-buy decision to allow App Annie to immediately claim leadership in this sector versus SimilarWeb, Localytics, comScore, Nielsen, etc.