
Dubai - Sharikat Mubasher: CE-Ventures, the corporate venture capital platform of Crescent Enterprises, participated in combined $657 million funding rounds for leading fintech and crypto firms building critical infrastructure for the next generation of financial services.
In a recent statement, the platform announced its participation in a $575 million funding round for Plaid, a Silicon Valley startup that provides the plumbing to connect consumer bank accounts to popular finance applications.
CE-Ventures also participated in an $82 million Series B funding round for Mesh, a startup focusing on digital asset movement. The round was led by Paradigm with participation from Consensys, QuantumLight Capital, Yolo Investments, and others.
These strategic investments reflect the current generational transformation in financial infrastructure, driven by defining trends of interoperability, programmability, and user-centricity.
Sudarshan Pareek, Senior Vice President at CE-Ventures, emphasized the platform’s commitment to investing in the financial systems of the future. “We are at the beginning of a systemic shift in global finance, from closed systems to open networks, from batch-based processing to real-time programmability, and from siloed fiat rails to interoperable digital assets. Plaid and Mesh are laying the technical infrastructure for that future.”
Plaid enables thousands of applications and institutions to securely link bank accounts, verify identities, and power fintech use cases such as lending, payments, and budgeting. As open finance expands globally.
Meanwhile, Mesh builds a blockchain-native API layer that allows users and platforms to transfer crypto and stablecoins seamlessly across wallets, exchanges, and applications.