Oryon
Portfolio indexActive · Seed · 2024
ActiveStablecoins & payments

Agora

CategoryStablecoin · Payments
HeadquartersNew York
FoundersNick van Eck, Drake Evans
— Overview

Agora provides white-label stablecoin infrastructure for financial institutions — the plumbing that lets a bank, fintech, or asset manager issue a branded programmable dollar without building the reserve management, compliance, and redemption stack from scratch.

The founding team combines Wall Street asset management (Nick van Eck comes from Van Eck Associates) with core stablecoin engineering (Drake Evans led early work at Frax). This blend has made Agora the go-to partner when a regulated institution decides to launch its own dollar token.

AUSD, the flagship reference token, has crossed $340M in circulation across 6 chains. The first bank partnership goes live in Q2 2026, followed by additional institutional launches later in the year.

— By the numbers
$340M
AUSD supply
18
Partners
6
Chains
2023
Founded
— Investment
Round
Seed 2024
Our role
Lead
Check size
$8M
Co-investors
Dragonfly · General Catalyst · Kraken Ventures
Board seat
Rob Hadick
— Our thesis

White-label stablecoin infrastructure for financial institutions. We wrote the seed check on the thesis that every fintech will eventually issue programmable dollars.

— Team
Nv

Nick van Eck

CEO & Co-Founder
DE

Drake Evans

CTO & Co-Founder
SR

Sam Ridley

Head of BD
AS

Alena Salazar

Head of Compliance
— Timeline
  1. 2023Founded by Nick van Eck and Drake Evans
  2. Q3 2024Oryon leads seed
  3. Q1 2025AUSD launch
  4. Q2 2026First bank partnership goes live
— Latest update

AUSD in circulation crossed $340M. First bank partnership announced Q1 2026.

— In the press

Agora is the picks-and-shovels layer for the coming wave of institutional stablecoins.

Fintech Weekly, 2025