Interview: Manuel Godoy of Félix on stablecoin rails and life after remittances
The Venezuelan-born founder of the WhatsApp remittance company explains why users never see the stablecoin, where liquidity runs dry and what the $200m round is meant to build.
In conversationManuel Godoyco-founder and chief executive of Félix
Manuel Godoy co-founded Félix, a Miami-based company that lets Latin American workers in the United States send money home by chatting with a bot on WhatsApp, typing or leaving voice notes, while the transfer settles behind the scenes in Circle's USDC stablecoin. On September 1, 2026 the company announced $200m of new financing, described as a Series C: $87m of equity led by Andreessen Horowitz, with QED Investors, Castle Island Ventures, Switch Ventures, Contour Venture Partners and Endeavor Catalyst taking part, plus a $113m commitment from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. Félix did not disclose a valuation, saying only that it had increased threefold since its $75m Series B led by QED in 2025.
The company says it has processed more than $8bn in transactions for more than 6 million people, links senders with 11 Latin American markets and grew revenue more than 2.5 times over the past year. The new money is meant to take it beyond transfers into lending and savings, offered through third-party partners and steered by an AI assistant it calls a Cognitive Financial Companion. That makes Félix a test case for a question the whole remittance industry now faces: once stablecoins have made moving money cheap, can a transfer app become a bank for the people it serves?
Answers are drawn from Manuel Godoy's public remarks; sources are linked below.
What will the new funding allow Félix to build?
We don't have to guess what our customers need next. They tell us. That has always been the secret to Félix: we build as close to our customers as possible. Latinos in this country have spent decades adapting to financial products that were never designed for them. We are building the opposite. With this funding, we will cement Félix as the Cognitive Financial Companion for a community traditional banks never built for. They should never have had to wait this long.
Why move into credit, and what will you do differently from a bank?
I experienced this problem personally. When I came to the U.S., even getting a small loan was harder than it should have been. Traditional financial institutions often start with the product they want you to use. We want to start with the person. You tell Félix what you need, in your own words, and we help you figure out the rest.
Is Félix still a remittance company?
We started Félix with remittances because sending money home is one of the most important financial needs our community has. Since then, we have processed more than $8 billion in transactions and impacted over six million people. But remittances were always the beginning. Now, we are building Félix into a Cognitive Financial Companion: a financial experience that begins with what someone wants to accomplish, rather than with a product, a form, or another app.
Where did the idea come from?
I always remember also one occasion, I was in Houston. I was 27 at the time. My mom calls me and she says like, hey Manuel, I need to send money to your grandma for an emergency, but I can't find a way. … Really sending money to Venezuela has been problematic. And we had to hack our way to doing that. We had to send a Zelle to somebody here in the US. That person would take the cash out and drive the cash to my grandma who used to live in a rural town back in Venezuela.
Going back to where we were in business school thinking about ideas, funnily enough we're sitting at a class and a professor shows a graph illustrating how remittances have been growing … for the last 50 years. … The punchline of the graph was that remittances to LatAm at the time, 90 billion dollars, 80% of those were still originated in cash in stores. Right? So, imagine that people would still commute to stores, standing in line, paying the fees. And I connected it to my personal story.
Why build the product inside WhatsApp rather than a standalone app?
After a lot of conversations, we realized two main things. One, folks deeply trust the store, right? It's the choice that they're making going to the store because they know that the money's going to get there. … But the second thing we realized, the second aspect of the behavior was that folks would come out of the store with a receipt. They would snap a picture of the receipt and send it over WhatsApp to their family member in Mexico or Central America. Cuz on that receipt you have the unique ID number that the person there needs to collect the cash. So, WhatsApp was part of the habit, right? … At this time we said, why not emulate the experience of WhatsApp, right? That human experience, but enabling the convenience of digital payment. And that's when we finally started to see some actual product market fit.
Why stablecoins, and why USDC rather than Bitcoin?
From my perspective, as a Venezuelan, when you grow up in Venezuela, when the country's currency gets destroyed by central control, you appreciate what crypto does. … We started realizing [these] people, they don't really care about crypto. They care that their family gets taken care of … So, we started realizing that Bitcoin wasn't feasible because we would bring volatility to the flow. And either we show that volatility even pricing for the user or we would eat that volatility, which would be kind of complex. So, we're like, okay, stablecoins make sense. … It was clear to us that USDC could be the great candidate because it's auditable, it's backed by US treasuries.
How does your model differ from Wise, and where does it still struggle?
What I love about stablecoin is that you're really, if you think about it, we're doing what Wise did on chain. We're tokenizing that float. Because think about it, stablecoin is bits. There's nothing moving. Right? It's a ledger. … The powerful thing about our model is that crypto or stablecoins … is a 24/7 market. So whenever we want to find liquidity, we find it with retailers directly. We go to the marketplace and we just say we have USDC. Who gives me pesos? … Effectively we're disintermediating, right? FX traders or banks. So no, we still don't need that local account to prefund.
On the liquidity issue that we have, again, is about like not finding those marketplaces locally. … To serve those corridors effectively, we do have to find more traditional partners … And that's why again, that's why like countries like Guatemala, Honduras, or immigrants from those countries, they don't use Wise. Like they don't know about Wise. … They use Western Union. They use MoneyGram, right?
Western Union and MoneyGram are experimenting with stablecoins of their own. How do you see that?
I believe there is only going to be two stablecoins winners and it's going to be USDC and maybe USDT. … Like there's no world in which you go and pay in cash in Guatemala, in Huehuetenango, a small town, with … I think it's USDPT, the Western Union one. Like that doesn't exist and that's not going to exist for the next few years. What's going to happen is that the USDC and USDT is going to be continually much more prevalent everywhere in the world and that's going to improve the liquidity, right?
Western Union and MoneyGram, I think it's a fair experiment that they're doing. They do have the distribution. They have the brand. They have the scale to do something like this. So, maybe some of this is going to really click. But ultimately they're not going to find liquidity, right? Where are they going to trade that back to local currencies or to dollars?
Sources
- Crunchbase News: WhatsApp remittance startup Félix secures $200M Series C led by a16z, General Catalyst
- FinTech Global: Félix lands $200m to rewire US Latino banking
- Finovate: Cross border money transfer outfit Félix raises $200 million
- The Investor Society: Félix raises US$200 million led by a16z and General Catalyst to expand beyond remittances into financial services
- Money Code (YouTube): Inside Felix's stablecoin remittance playbook w/ Manuel Godoy
- Tokenized (YouTube): Is the stablecoin sandwich dead?
Filed under Fintech. Written by Invest Times Editorial under our editorial standards. Commentary and analysis for information only, not investment advice.
