With just 15 employees, these 29-year-old founders are creating a financial supermarket for startups and small businesses.
By Emily Mason and Jeff Kauflin
In June 2022, five months before cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, Brandon Arvanaghi and Bryce Crawford began returning funds to the customers of Meow, the neobank they had launched to help startups and small businesses earn a return on idle corporate cash through crypto.
It was both a prudent and gutsy decision. Prudent, because after the collapse of stablecoin TerraUSD in mid-May of 2022, they began hearing rumors that crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital would go bankrupt — which it soon did, eventually bringing a bundle of connected firms down. Gutsy, because just weeks before, they had closed a $22 million series A fundraising round from investors including Tiger Global, QED and yes, FTX itself. That money had been raised to support a platform Arvanaghi and Crawford had built allowing startups and small businesses to use their spare cash to earn yield by lending money to institutional crypto operations that themselves did lending and trading.
Now the founders had the VCs’ money, but no plan for what to do with it. “We were right (about crypto), but then we’re sitting there and we have no business model,” Arvanaghi, the 29-year CEO, recalls. “We had basically no assets on the platform and were starting from scratch. We just said, ‘Look, we’re going to figure it out.’” Arvanaghi and CTO Crawford, also 29, did figure it out, earning them spots on the Forbes 2024 30 Under 30 list for finance.
The second act they devised is as far from crypto as you can get, yet still exploited the fintech platform they’d built to collect and deploy small businesses’ cash. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates to quash inflation. Now, the young founders realized, boring old Treasury bills were becoming a newly attractive place for businesses to park their idle…
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