On 12 November 2025 a deal worth about $2 billion fell apart. Five months later the same company was sold for nearly as much.
BVNK is the stablecoin payments firm that Coinbase had been negotiating to buy. In October 2025 Fortune reported that both Coinbase and Mastercard were in advanced talks to acquire it. BVNK entered exclusive negotiations with Coinbase. Then Coinbase ended them.
But few could handle the wallets, compliance and conversion between currencies on their own.
The founders are three South Africans who built the company in London: Jesse Hemson-Struthers, the chief executive, a serial entrepreneur who had run online businesses at home; Donald Jackson, the technologist, who had founded Cue, a bootstrapped customer engagement platform, and Verity, a fraud reduction service; and Chris Harmse, a chartered financial analyst and FX trader who had been a partner at a macro and crypto fund. One built things, one wrote the code, one understood money.
They started BVNK in 2021 with a plain observation. Companies in Africa, Europe and elsewhere wanted to settle payments in stablecoins, which move around the clock and cost far less than the card and bank rails. But few could handle the wallets, compliance and conversion between currencies on their own. BVNK offered that as infrastructure.
Investors noticed. In December 2024 it raised a Series B at a valuation of about $750 million, with Haun Ventures among the backers. A year later the valuation conversation had moved to $1.5 to $2.5 billion.
The Coinbase collapse could have been the end of the momentum. Instead, on 17 March 2026, Mastercard announced it would acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, with $300 million of that tied to contingent payments. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026. Harmse's reaction, reported at the time: 'Needless to say, there's a big smile on my face.'
The cost of that smile is not small. A failed exclusive deal tells every competitor and customer that a company is for sale, and it leaves a young firm exposed. The founders have said little about it in public.
What they did show is that a deal's death is not a company's death. If you build the thing the biggest players need, a second bidder is already in the room. The work that matters is the work done before the offer arrives.