TL;DR
- Tether invested $20 million in Ualá, the Argentine neobank with over 11 million customers in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia.
- The investment is part of a $197 million funding round led by Allianz X, which valued Ualá at $3.2 billion post-money.
- Ualá’s CEO clarified that local regulations prevent the integration of USDT in the short term and that Tether participates solely as a financial investor.
Tether invested $20 million in Ualá, the Argentine neobank with more than 11 million customers in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. The transaction is part of a $197 million funding round announced by Ualá in March 2026 and led by Allianz X, which set the company’s post-money valuation at $3.2 billion.
Tether had been mentioned as a participant in the original announcement, but the exact amount of its investment only became known now, representing an approximate stake of 0.6% of the firm’s post-money capital.
Pierpaolo Barbieri, CEO of Ualá, clarified to Bloomberg that current regulations in Argentina and Mexico prevent any immediate integration of the USDT stablecoin into the platform. According to Barbieri, Tether participates in the round exclusively as a financial investor, with no associated operational agreements at this time.
Tether’s Expansion in the Region
The move is part of a regional deployment strategy that the USDT issuer has been executing consistently. In April, it led a $14 million Series A round for Belo, an Argentine cryptocurrency payments platform, with participation from Titan Fund, The Venture City, Mindset Ventures, and G2, among other investors.
In early July, it directed another $20 million to Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin to support the expansion of its onchain infrastructure in the region. It also controls 70% of Adecoagro, an agricultural and energy producer with operations in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Tether funds these investments with the surplus capital generated by the yields on the reserves backing USDT, the stablecoin with the largest market capitalization in the world, which had approximately $184 billion in circulation at the time of publication. The company reported a profit of $1.04 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to data published by the firm itself.
