ZBD Secures $40M in Series C Funding for Real-Money Game Transactions

ZBD, born as Zebedee and still carrying that offbeat cartoon name energy, just locked in a $40 million Series C on January 22, 2026, and it reads less like a crypto headline and more like a payments thesis finally getting its due. Hoboken, New Jersey is not where hype cycles go to hide, but it is where this fintech payments platform quietly built real money rails for games that actually ship, scale, and pay players without asking permission from Stripe, PayPal, or the usual toll collectors.

Simon Cowell founded the company in October 2019 alongside André Neves and Christian Moss, and the origin story matters because none of them came chasing NFTs or casino chips dressed as avatars. Simon Cowell came out of institutional finance and asset management, including time at NXMH around the Bitstamp acquisition. André Neves brought deep Bitcoin and Lightning Network chops shaped at Chaincode Labs. Christian Moss, known online as MandelDuck, had already shipped one of the first Bitcoin games back in 2013. This was never about speculation. It was about payments behaving like payments.

ZBD made a deliberate call during the loudest years of crypto to stay boring in the most profitable way possible. No play to earn slogans. No token theatrics. Just Bitcoin on the Lightning Network doing what it does best. Instant settlement. Micropayments down to fractions of a cent. Developer friendly SDKs and APIs that slot into games in days, not quarters. The result is 55 live games, more than 120 million transactions annually, and a 450 percent year over year MAU jump in 2024 that did not need a bull market to explain it.

Blockstream Capital Partners led this Series C with $36 million of the $40 million round, with Adam Back’s fingerprints all over the conviction. Nicolas Brand steps in as board observer, reinforcing that this is infrastructure capital, not trend chasing. Total funding now stands at $86.5 million, backing a team of roughly 70 people operating globally, fully remote, and licensed in ways most crypto companies only talk about. First MiCAR approval globally. EMI license in the Netherlands. Money transmitter coverage across the United States. This is compliance with teeth.

The leadership bench reflects that seriousness. Simon Cowell as Chief Executive Officer. André Neves as Chief Technology Officer shaping the Lightning Address and LNURL standards now used across the industry. Marca Wosoba running operations with regulatory muscle. Ben Cousens driving strategy from a games focused venture background. Nicole Diaz stepping in to scale payments product. This is not a lab experiment. It is a payments company hiding inside gaming, and gaming just happens to be the most unforgiving stress test there is.

ZBD is expanding card issuance, virtual IBANs, console and PC integrations, and a broader payments stack that treats creators, players, and developers like participants instead of endpoints. In an industry obsessed with spectacle, ZBD is doing the unsexy work that compounds. Real money, real time, real scale. Watch who leans in next, because the games are already telling you who is getting paid.