The gaming payments space just received a serious infusion of investor cash.
Today, January 22, the fintech and gaming payments company ZBD announced a $40 million Series C funding round backed by Blockstream Capital Partners, with the goal of further enhancing the company’s growth as a vertically-integrated payments provider built natively for gaming.
The funding round announced today is ZBD’s third official fundraising round, following an $11.5 million Series A round in 2021 and a $35 million Series B round in 2022, both under the company’s former name of Zebedee. To date, ZBD has raised a total of $90 million in funding, according to the company’s official website. The company has not publicly revealed its valuation during any past funding rounds.
“We have been following ZBD for many years and believe it has achieved a rare pairing of native Bitcoin payments technology with an expansive and hard-to-replicate licensing framework across key regulatory regimes,” said Blockstream Capital Partners partner Nicolas Brand in a press release. “This places ZBD among a very small group of credible Bitcoin payment service providers.”
ZBD’s payments platform supports payouts in fiat currency, Bitcoin and gift cards. Last year was a growth year for the company, with ZBD gaining 2 million new users and over 60 new game studio partners in 2025, as well as processing over 120 million reward transactions across its platform, according to numbers shared by a company representative. Over the past 12 months, the number of games integrated with ZBD’s software development kit has doubled. ZBD uses the Lightning Network payment protocol to handle its Bitcoin transactions.
“Our mission is simple: to make money work in games by providing all-in-one payments technology to publishers and developers,” said ZBD chief strategy officer Ben Cousens in a press release. “The current financial and reward systems in games are slow and unwieldy, but ZBD is bringing the power of the Lightning network to deliver rewards at speed, while giving developers the flexibility to choose how they are presented.”
Last year, ZBD secured both Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) and Electric Money Institution (EMI) licenses in the Netherlands, allowing the company to administer fiat and cryptocurrency payment services throughout the European Economic Area.
Moving forward into 2026, the company plans to streamline its offerings into a complete, compliance-ready payments stack intended to give game publishers across console, PC and mobile platforms complete control over the movement of money inside their games. At the moment, ZBD’s largest market is mobile, but the company views this situation as an opportunity for expansion as it builds closer relationships with developers and publishers on other devices and platforms.
“ZBD is the payments infrastructure for the future of video games and virtual worlds, where real money moves natively through content,” said ZBD CEO and co-founder Simon Cowell in a press release. “By giving developers and publishers full control of their payments infrastructure, we’re maximizing their revenue and creating additional value streams with new, real-money experiences that can be deeply embedded into gameplay.”
