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Payments and Compliance, Unified: Investing in Frame
We’re investing in Frame via Deepwater Venture Fund II as we believe Frame has the potential to become the operating system for financial services and compliance, initially focusing on high-compliance industries such as crypto, real-money gaming, telehealth, and travel.
Stripe processes nearly $2T in annual payments volume but does not support certain high-compliance industries. Frame is building a platform specifically for these merchants—where compliance is not an edge case, but the core requirement. Rather than treating compliance as a separate workflow, Frame is designed around the idea that compliance and money movement are the same problem. Overtime, Frame is positioning itself as a unified financial and compliance stack that can serve any business where payments complexity and regulatory requirements intersect.
Deepwater participated in Frame’s Seed round during 2024. Co-investors in the round included Palm Drive Capital and Blue Wire Capital, among others.
Growing online transaction volume is an undeniable truth. However, many businesses are rejected by traditional payments processors, such as Stripe—not only because of the industries they operate in, but because existing infrastructure separates payments from compliance. High-compliance merchants are forced to stitch together processors, fraud tools, onboarding systems, and regulatory workflows, creating fragmented and inefficient operations:
- Stripe’s annual payments volume represents less than 2% of global GDP, and its model is optimized for standardized, lower-compliance use cases. As online transactions grow, Stripe will continue to benefit by focusing on simplicity and scale.
- With a massive greenfield opportunity in lower-risk categories, Stripe is likely to continue prioritizing these segments—leaving behind industries where compliance is foundational to doing business.
- These dynamics create a large and underserved opportunity for a platform that unifies payments and compliance into a single system. Industries outside of Stripe’s focus represent over $1.5 trillion in annual payments volume in the U.S. alone, much of which requires deeply embedded compliance infrastructure to unlock.
Frame’s platform is built to collapse this fragmented stack. Through AI-driven underwriting, embedded KYC/KYB, fraud monitoring, and bank connectivity, Frame enables merchants to onboard, operate, and scale within a single system. Instead of layering compliance on top of payments, Frame integrates identity verification, geocompliance, and regulatory workflows directly into transaction flows, turning compliance into a feature of the product rather than a bottleneck.
This approach allows Frame to function as an operating system rather than a point solution. Merchants can accept payments, manage payouts, monitor fraud, and stay compliant through one integration and one unified ledger. By bringing compliance and payments together, onboarding timelines shrink from months to days, and ongoing operations become significantly more efficient.