Lightspark's acquisition will offer an end-to-end payments experience for fiat and crypto, across European Member States and sets the stage for MiCA and EMI licenses
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October 14, 05.00 AM PT Los Angeles, USA, 03:00 PM EEST Tallinn, Estonia:
Today, we’re excited to share that Striga has been acquired by Lightspark.
We’ve built the pioneering embedded finance and digital asset infrastructure platform with a robust regulatory footprint in Europe, operating through our VASP license across 30 countries in the European Economic Area (EEA). Our deep regulatory expertise, licensing framework, and financial services stack, including direct integrations with fiat providers, card networks, and banks, will accelerate Lightspark’s ability to bring compliant, borderless money movement to millions of users and businesses worldwide.
Lightspark will work closely with Striga to bring incremental capabilities and offerings to customers, while also strengthening its regulatory positioning in Europe by applying for both e-money and MiCA licenses. Lightspark will then be able to offer a complete end-to-end experience to its customers, both for fiat and crypto across European member states.
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Striga was built from the ground up to solve a problem that every fintech or crypto builder knows: launching a compliant financial product is hard. Really hard.
From card issuing and virtual IBAN creation to crypto custody and fiat ramps, we’ve built a modern payments stack that abstracts away the complexity of regulation, licensing, compliance, and integration with banks, brokers, and card schemes by offering a single API interface to the most common modern payment instruments, enabling builders to launch sophisticated financial products in weeks, not years.
While we built the company with as much integrity and grit as a regulated bank, we operated under the YC ethos of making something people actually want. We didn’t just build the stack. We also earned the VASP license to operate in the EU. Striga was the first company approved under Estonia’s new, MiCA-style regulatory system in 2022 after establishing its HQ in Tallinn, Estonia. In a post-2022 world where regulators were cracking down, we emerged as a rare success story: compliant, post product market fit, default-alive and trusted by over 50 companies building regulated finance apps, wallets, and card programs across the EEA.
Lightspark is building open payments for the Internet, powered by Bitcoin. To unlock that, we need to make payments as open, easy, compliant, and seamless as sending a message online, especially for financial institutions and regulated businesses. With Striga, Lightspark gains:
Bringing Bitcoin into everyday finance isn’t just about technology—it’s about trust, compliance, and real-world interoperability. Striga’s infrastructure bridges the gap between crypto innovation and traditional financial institutions by doing the heavy lifting: onboarding users, managing compliance, issuing cards, and connecting to fiat rails. This, paired with Lightspark’s protocol-level capabilities, such as Spark, provides a powerful combination: regulated endpoints that can connect to open, global money movement.
Imagine a neobank in France issuing a debit card backed by Bitcoin. A crypto wallet in Spain offering instant Bitcoin payments with IBAN pay-ins. A cross-border payments app in Portugal onboards users and seamlessly converts euros to sats. All in a fully compliant way. That’s the future we’re building, where Bitcoin isn't just an asset, but a foundation for global, open, regulated payments.
Our one unified platform will deliver a fully compliant, always-on, Internet-scale payments experience for partners and their users. Of course, Striga will continue to serve existing customers with the same high level of service and support, while becoming an integral part of Lightspark’s infrastructure stack.
We’re thrilled to welcome the entire Striga team to Lightspark, including CEO Prashanth Balasubramanian and key leaders across compliance, risk, engineering, and growth. They’ve built something exceptional and together, we’re going to take it even further.
About Lightspark
The Internet has open protocols for everything, except money. Lightspark is changing that. We're building modern, always-on payment solutions powered by Bitcoin: the only open, neutral network for moving value. With enterprise tools like Connect, UMA, and Spark, businesses can send and receive money instantly, securely, and at a fraction of the cost, anytime, anywhere. Follow on X @lightspark
About Striga
Striga has built the tools that innovators need to build compliant payment applications covering Bitcoin, stablecoins, and fiat across 30 countries in the EEA, without doing any of the heavy lifting. Backed by YCombinator, UC Berkeley, Stillmark, Fulgur Ventures, and many other notable names, Striga has enabled European businesses to move more than 2000 Bitcoin in less than 28 months, at a tiny fraction of the time and cost it takes to build an EU-compliant payment product.
We just recently announced that Striga has joined, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the support and curiosity from our community. We’ve received a lot of great questions — here are some of the most common ones, along with what’s next for Striga and Lightspark.
Book a call with us to learn how Striga can get your payment flow approved and launched in record time. No NDAs needed and we commit to upfront, transparent pricing to meet the needs of both startups and enterprises.
