Toronto-based payments platform nanoPay announced yesterday that it has raised $10 million in a Series A round in order to expand its business and offerings, most notably its open API platform, MintChip.

MintChip was developed by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2012 and shuttered in 2014. In January 2016, the project was bought by nanoPay.

Notably, the lead investor in the round was the merchant banking division of Goldman Sachs, which may be offering trendy services like Marcus to consumers, but still hasn’t really managed to shake off its whole “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” image (thank you, Matt Taibbi.)

A fintech startup still in its relatively early stages (nanoPay was founded in 2012, so still a young’un) teaming up with an old standby like Goldman may be a sign that the “collaboration vs. competition” debate that has roiled financial services for years is over.

“I’m a believer in collaboration, and I’m a believer in central banks,” says nanoPay CEO and founder Laurence Cooke, who began the platform because he “couldn’t understand why payments were so bad.”

nanoPay offers open APIs to banks and other payment providers in order to facilitate transactions that are settled securely in real-time. The company launched MintChip—a platform for digital transactions—in Canada earlier this year, and plans to use the new funding to expand its business partnerships and the extent of its service.

Like bitcoin, one of the draws of the platform is the fact that it can process transactions without the need for a third party—unlike bitcoin (which incidentally Cooke is not a particular fan of), nanoPay currently supports around 24 currencies and can process around 30,000 transactions per second. For the curious, bitcoin can handle 7 per second.

“Every transaction we do is intended to go from a known sender to a known receiver,” says Cooke of eliminating the need for intermediaries. “We need to go back to that trust relationship between merchant and consumer.”

To learn more about payments, join us in Tel Aviv for Bank Innovation Israel this November 1-3.Register here.