Payments are messy for operators, and Soap Payments wants to clean it up

Payments have always been the unglamorous side of real-money gaming. Operators building in the space quickly find out that Stripe won't touch them, that standing up a compliant payments stack means negotiating with a half-dozen vendors before taking a single bet, and that bad actors will find every gap in the system before they do. Most early-stage operators are stitching it together themselves. Soap Payments thinks there's a better way.

Filip Michalsky co-founded Soap with Sam Edelstein and Tyler Carlin after all three landed at the Antler accelerator in New York in late 2024. Michalsky came with a background in financial services and data science—he studied AI at Harvard in 2017 and spent time at Fidelity before trying to build a mortgage lending platform that stalled when rates spiked. Carlin had just sold Jock MKT, live trading DFS game acquired by Splash Sports, but felt the payments friction first-hand. Edelstein had worked at Brex, the finance platform taking a modern approach to spending. When Michalsky raised the payments problem he'd run into previously, the team started reaching out to operators. One of them responded by sending a PDF that outlined, almost exactly, what they were already planning to build.

What followed was a fundraise from Antler before a single line of code was written, a May 2025 launch, and a quick follow-on check from AeroPay (who later became an official partner), plus a check from Astralis Capital.

The product Soap is building sits above the actual payment processors. The orchestration platform routes transactions, manages tokenization, and handles downstream payment methods without touching the money directly. For operators, particularly early-stage startups, the pitch is consolidation: KYC, 3DS, geolocation, and chargeback protection in one place, with no minimum commitments, and an AI-assisted onboarding process that compresses what typically takes weeks or months. 

"Traditionally it could take weeks to months to get onboarded," Michalsky said on the podcast. "What we have done is we have built an AI-native onboarding system, which uses large language models to basically get all of these requirements, distill them down into one streamlined application."

For scaling operators, the story shifts to redundancy and operational efficiency. Soap runs waterfall logic across processors to maximize acceptance rates while keeping fraud low—a data science problem that Michalsky, by his own admission, geeks out about.

Where things get more interesting is stablecoins. Soap has added unified fiat and stablecoin rails, and Michalsky sees stablecoins not as a user-facing feature but as a back-office infrastructure upgrade. Instant settlement, where a card swipe turns into operator funds in five seconds, is coming soon. The argument is that the user experience doesn't need to change; the iceberg just moves faster. "The user could still use their card," he said. "However, the entire iceberg moves the funds faster in and out."

The stablecoin push fits a broader pattern in gaming infrastructure right now. Settlement speed, cross-border treasury management, and fraud exposure are real pain points for operators trying to expand internationally—and the regulatory environment around stablecoins in the US is shifting in ways that make them increasingly viable. 

The company has 30-plus customers today—mostly sweepstakes, DFS, and skill gaming operators. Soap is targeting a seed round later this year to move upmarket, expand internationally, and add headless checkout. The plan is to be the payments layer that operators don't have to think about. Michalsky summarized the goal simply: “reduce the pain of running your business.”

Listen to the full podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.