Alta announced a $47.5 million Series A round led by Index Ventures on 10 November 2026, according to Fortune, The Block and Crypto Briefing. GV (Google Ventures), Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg and Capital49 also took part; Fortune describes Capital49 as a venture firm set up by the cofounders of Airwallex. Fortune’s headline rounds the amount to $48 million, while its text and the other outlets say $47.5 million. The valuation was not disclosed.

Funding history

The Block and the company’s release, as republished by The Daily Hodl, say the round brings Alta’s total funding to $80 million, including a $32.5 million seed round. Fortune says the seed was backed mainly by Airwallex. Forbes Australia reported in October that Airwallex led the seed with Capital49 as co-lead, giving the amount as about A$45 million (US$32.5 million) after correcting an earlier figure. Fortune and Crypto Briefing say the company was recently called Metal; The Block and the release copy do not mention the old name.

What Alta does

Alta is building a layer 1 blockchain for banks, payments firms and large financial institutions, with privacy and compliance features. The release says it uses “recursive zero-knowledge cryptography” to keep balances, transactions, identities and compliance policies private while proving that transactions meet required rules, and bundles settlement with payments connectivity, foreign exchange and treasury management. Co-founder and CEO Loong Wang said, according to The Block and the release: “Existing blockchains aren’t designed for the privacy and compliance requirements of global financial institutions.”

The first product, according to the release and The Block, is meant to reduce the cash held in prefunded accounts through just-in-time funding and to move idle cash into yield-bearing tokenized assets; no launch date or price was given. Airwallex is described as an early design partner, and the release says the collaboration covers stablecoin pay-ins and pay-outs and connections to local fiat networks in 200 countries and 90 currencies. The release says funds will go to blockchain development, institutional partnerships and growing the engineering and compliance teams. Fortune reports about 25 employees, with offices in San Francisco and Melbourne.

Company claims

The release states that about $4 trillion is tied up in prefunded accounts globally and cites an outside Nasdaq release for the figure; Lens did not check it. No revenue, transaction volume or customers were disclosed, and no customers are named.

Sources and notes

Sources: Fortune (Jeff John Roberts, 10 November 2026), The Block (Kyle Baird, 10 November), Crypto Briefing (John Chen, 10 November), the company release as republished by The Daily Hodl (a sponsored copy; the GlobeNewswire original returned an access error), Forbes Australia (22 October) and a June 2026 KuCoin Flash item on the seed. Lens did not find Alta’s own website. The sources differ on several points: the $48 million headline versus $47.5 million; The Block’s web address mentions $80 million although its text gives that as the total; the release lists Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang as a co-founder of Alta while Fortune presents him as Airwallex’s CEO and The Block describes Airwallex as a partner rather than an investor; and Catherine Porter is called co-founder and president in the release but a co-founder and former Meta executive in Fortune. Search results also showed an unrelated company called ALTA Blockchain Labs.

Image: Server racks in the computer server room at the NOIRLab headquarters, Tucson, Arizona. Photo: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Stand-in image; it does not show Alta or its systems.