Inside MoonPay's Newest Acquisition: Building AI Accounting for the Stablecoin Era

We're getting acquired by MoonPay, and we're really excited about the opportunity because they're really building the future of financial infrastructure across all aspects of finance, and we play a pivotal role in that. Stablecoins and dollars would just be one in the same. All of this activity that's happening now on chain with stablecoins has to get to the GL. And without that, people cannot operate their business. They can't fundraise. They can't pass audits.

They can't get acquired or they can't acquire a business. By 2030, over, like, 50% of accountants will have retired. And there's what? Maybe, like, 3,000,000 CPAs in the world, and there's, a $100,000,000,000,000 of GDP. We're not a rip and replace. Just point us to what is taking you the most time or what are the things that you cannot do that we can do on your behalf. AI will reduce your bottom line and stablecoins will ultimately increase your top line because you can just service more people.

You can build a global business.

Hey. It's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz.

This was pretty last minute, so I appreciate you Yeah. Just coming in. Well, I'm I mean, I saw the picture of the studio. I was like, alright. Let's Alright. This is legit. Let's give it a go. We had you I moved every customer call. I'm like, hey, guys. Sorry. My consensus. Even though I wasn't

planning on it on Thanks for doing this. No. Of course. I'm excited to get into I I know we talked yesterday on the live show, and thank you for that. But, you know, that was pretty fast, we only had So 10 excited to get into what you're building, some of the big news that is about to hit. Hopefully, when this airs, that news will be public, and we can get into that. Yeah. Why don't we start with the just the basics of your background and how you really came across this problem that you are now solving?

Yeah. Start the intro. Yeah. Absolutely. I have a very interesting career in that I've just only been working in accounting. I'm not a CPA. I've also didn't study finance in college or anything like that. I was a software engineer by trade. I started my career at Workday as a software engineer and got to really see the plumbing of ERP systems and how they interact with the financial system. So I was on specifically the cash management banking and settlements team at Workday.

What is Workday for people who don't know? Yeah. So it's a Fortune 50 company. Fortune 50? Yeah. Huge. Well, maybe not now after Claude, After Anthropic is just coming out there. When you were there. Well, when I was there, yeah, you know, it was like, you know, $5,060,000,000,000 dollar market cap. But, I mean, they they serve the majority of the Fortune 500 when it comes to HR. They also have a very big penetration in the enterprise market for financial software, general ledger software, accounting software.

And they just had spun out from from PeopleSoft when Oracle took it over. And so that team ended up creating Workday. And what was really cool about, you know, working there was understanding the history of accounting software and how it all came to be and what went from having your financial data as a CFO, like, in a server room in your building, in your office space because you just could not stomach the idea of your financial data for the company being stored elsewhere or into the hands of other people.

You know, Oracle would come in and do, like, these very capital intensive implementations. And then as the rise of cloud software happened, Workday was really the first one to pioneer ERP systems in the cloud. Interesting. And so yeah.

And so that really enabled companies to go global from a back office perspective because now instead of having fragmented ERPs in The US and then in, you know, in Brazil and then SAP in Europe and you had all of these different sources of truth across your your company, you could have it all consolidated. And so that was really the promise of cloud software. And, obviously, that took off in the last decade, you know, from the 2000 late two thousands to February.

And so I I spent a good amount of time working on very financially heavy accounting workflows, like book to bank reconciliation, cash positioning, cash forecasting. You became, like Yeah. You you became an expert at this type of these rails. So as some as actually, as an intern. So I actually was there as an intern. They extended my internship. I be it became like a co op.

And so as I was studying as a junior and senior in college, I was working full time at Workday, I was the youngest engineer on the financial side. And you stayed there after graduation? Yeah. I stayed there after graduation. So I was there for, like, about three years. Worked from everything from BAI to integrations, which is like the bank statement formats that, you know, later Plaid democratized.

So Plaid ended up allowing the Oracles, SAPs, and Workis of the world were built building bespoke and, like, direct to every single bank. You know, a Plaid type company comes in and, you know, makes it accessible to developers, and that was really internal tech to enterprise software. Yeah. I just had a lot of exposure at a very early young engineer on how manual a lot of the stuff was and working with accountants. When I was there, I some of our top customers were, like, Netflix and J. P.

Hunt, and so I was, you know, working with those finance teams and controllers to help them with their treasury and cash management needs. And so that built a very strong foundation of, like, everything that's wrong with fiat and the current system and how the accounting stack in the last ten years was basically, like, zombified.

So, yeah, that that's kind of Yeah. The origin story of my career in this space. What are the parallels that you see in terms of the the role that Workday played with cloud and Yeah. Riding that wave? What kind of parallels do you see happening now with, like, agents and information and data? Yeah. I feel like we're going through a really interesting, maybe similar moment with what cloud was for, you know, physical racks, like, in your building.

It's like it seems like a lot of teams and even some of the past guests that we've had on the show, you know, shout out to Nikhil and Infinite. Go back and listen to that episode. It was really interesting. A lot of founders are like, hey, what is the role for accounting and compliance and all these different things within my business and trying to think through where we're heading here, it seems like we're and what you've built is kind of right at the forefront of that. No.

Do you see those two things as similar shifts? Yeah. So I love geeking out on the history of this because I I feel like it's not very obvious to people and probably one of the few things that I'm very good at. So I think the interesting part of accounting was everyone really used to fight over the general ledger. And blockchains are ledgers, but not in the same way as a GL. So general ledgers are

business ledgers. They're understandable to Why were people fighting over it? What does that what does what does that mean before if you were the general ledger back in the day, you were the final stop Your truth. The truth before you report to the street, before board meetings, management reporting. If it wasn't in the GL, it didn't happen. Right?

And this is what we I mean, we can get into it, but, like, getting all of this activity that's happening now on chain with stablecoins, smart contracts, on off ramps, deposits, all of that. Like, it has to get somewhere. It has to get to the GL. And without that, people cannot operate their business. They can't fundraise. They can't pass audits. They can't get acquired or they can't acquire a business, and these are all things that we've happened to help our customers with.

So the GL was very, very important to the point where Oracle would even offer it for free to undercut Workday. Because once you were the GL, it not just gave you very long, like, retention, ten year retention, revenue retention on just the GL alone, it allowed you to increase revenue by upselling customers because once you're the GL, well, hey, why are you using this AP tool? Like, just use our native AP tool that already integrates with the GL.

Oh, use our invoicing solution because, you know, all of this revenue accounting that you're doing outside of the our system ultimately have to manually, like, reconcile and get it in. It was like a way to upsell companies with new products. And so what's really, really interesting now is we're also seeing a huge shift with companies like Mercury, Ramp, even like, Neo Bank or new banks like Slash, where they're all trying to solve this bookkeeping problem because they have really sticky problem. Exactly.

Really sticky. Yeah. How are you seeing

so you so you've spent a lot of your early career finding this fascinating, which I think is really unique. I was talking to Zach last night about, like, the things that we as humans find the most fascinating. And I have found talking with a lot of founders, building our own business, it seems that the people who go and build the best things are just following what they find the most fascinating.

And it's interesting how you what you've ended ended up building was was in some ways a very direct result of that, like, probably very weird and niche fascination with, like, the history of accounting and how these things work. And, like, it takes that level of, I guess, curiosity. Like, what what was it about this industry that made it worth you have spent years of your life understanding this space even though you didn't it sounds like you didn't go to school Yeah. To be an accountant.

You were a software engineer. Yeah. Like, what what was it about this? Yeah. So

And we'll come back to slash and ramp and all that stuff because there's so much there, but like Yeah. No. No. This is a great it's a very technical problem, and that's what I am good at. I'm I'm good at solving technical problems. I like doing the hardest things I can find. And this was, like, radioactive to product people, and people really found back office software unsexy. And a lot of teams have come and gone and have tried to solve this.

So, you know, when I went from Workday to WeWork, this was at the peak valuation. And I you know, WeWork was one of the biggest companies at the time, and they didn't even have it figured out. And so when I came there to solve this problem, that's where it was like everything I learned from Workday, trying to apply it when it was already too late, was like a very very good learning experience.

So this was like a reinforcement, like, experience for me, where not a lot of people get to enter something at the very very tip top, and then see it go all the way back, you know, down. Right? And so for two years, I was fighting this extremely hard uphill battle. And no matter how much of like, how efficient we got, no matter

what products we shipped. It was just too late, and it was too You you got brought in at the peak of the chaos. Exactly. I mean, I've watched all of the WeWork things. Like, I I've I found it completely fascinating. I I don't know if you saw the latest Rick Rubin interview. I saw a couple clips with with Adam from that. Anyway, there's so much such a wild moment to be entering this. What what did they ask you to do? What was the the thing that you were trying to accomplish that was too late? Yeah. So it's funny.

It's kinda like every step of the way, like, led me to this moment with Entendre. But the theme or the narrative around WeWork was structured like a traditional real estate business, which is a massive massive industry. Every office space, every property

that WeWork owned or leased was a legal entity on its own, had its own balance sheet, had its own p and l. Bank accounts. Bank accounts. In those regions that they were in. In every like, in The US, say I don't know the number, but say there was a 100 office spaces. That was a 100 legal entities that all had to close their books every month, collect rent every month, pay bills every month, pay employees every month.

And then you can even get into really interesting problems like lending agreements where, you know, let's say you're JPMorgan, you're gonna lend to WeWork, but you only want your cash stored in the locations that you're lending to. You don't want, you know, Morgan Stanley's cash and Wells Fargo's cash to be commingled with your cash because in the event of some default or bankruptcy or something, you know, these lenders wanna know that they would be able to recover their loans.

And so this is something that on a very, like, global scale is tens of trillions of dollars, and this is extremely difficult to solve. And now it's extremely possible in, like, you know, ten years later. Yeah. You know, this is the big opportunity. This is how you're gonna build the next billion dollar business is making it so that all of these barriers from a tax, from a legal perspective, a regulatory perspective, doesn't matter because humans are no longer required to get the job done.

And so, you know, at the time I was there, we had over 300 full time accountants. Wow. We had How do we work? Yeah. And we had multiple consulting firms, Deloitte, Grant Thornton, you know, everyone was just trying to solve this thing. And, yeah, ultimately, like, I stayed through the softening takeover, and that led me to my next role, which was an early hire on the product team for Cloud Kitchens, which at the same time was basically structured, again, like a real estate company.

But it was still very, very early after, you know, Travis bought the company where, okay, I was like, this is a real chance for me to build something sustainable and long term. And we built basically an entire money platform at Cloud Kitchens while I was there and I was able to scale that out. You're able to kind of write what you build what you wish existed. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

I was able to I mean, we had, like, general managers, like like, banging on our door, like, demanding that we onboard their, you know, facilities into our platform because we were able to just, like, from first principles design this before it became already, you know, a $50,000,000,000 global business.

When we were at WeWork, and and this also relates to payments, like, we were trying to unlock markets like Vietnam and Russia, and the facilities would have been were already or the the office spaces were already live. People were, like, moving in, and they just, like, couldn't pay rent, you know. So and then community managers who are not accounts receivable people, right, like collecting checks or having to, like, take Venmos to try to, like, keep the the tenants or, like, the the companies in the space. So, yeah.

And and so everyone was really a lot of people are focused on increasing payments volume and increasing adoption of stablecoins and all that, which is obviously a massive problem that is worth solving and is is being solved very well. But I think the wall that kind of everyone stops is that, like, business adoption and enterprise adoption, and you're not gonna be able to do that without the backing of back office, the CFO, and, you know, that part is still highly untapped.

What are you most what are you most grateful for when you look back at the

WeWork chapter of your career?

I I mean, it's it was amazing. Again, I'm in a very fortunate and rare situation where I was able to work, you know, building an ERP system at a very reputable company that was doing a very, very good job at the time compared to other legacy software. And then working for Adam and Travis, like, two very notorious, ruthless founders, you get to like seeing them operate, you learn a lot. Yeah. So very lucky. Yeah.

Regardless of the outcome, it was still, at least for WeWork, like, relationships I built, the things that I learned about scaling companies, you know, I'm never gonna learn that anywhere else. And and and probably the I mean, the most recent example I can think of was like FTX. Right? But, like, it's not very often you get to be

kind of on the inside of the tornado or like eye of the storm. Right? Yep. And so that's a unique thing that I'm thankful for. Yeah. So framing I I mean, we could rabbit hole what was what it was like to work with them. We'll I'll talk about that later because I'm really interested in those two specifically. But you have these two use cases and maybe that we're kind of bringing back the altitudes and slashes and people like that. You have you have those types of companies that are growing extremely fast.

They're building financial products. They're a lot of them are doing things with stablecoins and are kind of going from first principles on chain. And it seems like that, like companies like RAIN, Braille, like these modern stablecoin native organizations on this side.

And then you also have maybe more of the WeWork type of use cases where it's like big existing companies, people who have been around for decades or a long time, and they are trying to update their systems and they are trying to maybe they have, yeah, hundreds, thousands of accountants on staff and they're like, we need to figure this out. It seems like from what I know about your business, you've really focused on this new cohort. What would be your your advice or your guidance to the the larger of the group?

Like, what would you recommend they do or how to think about this? Yeah. What's interesting is you have to, as a founder, kinda, like, make make a bet. And

I believe a lot of these new businesses that you mentioned, like the slashes of the world, they're gonna be massive businesses, and they're gonna be core infrastructure for future companies. But that is a very long game that you have to play, and it's going to and and and I would say there's still kind of a lot of unknowns and and just, like, where the world's gonna go because with AI, for example, the AI labs, Anthropic, it's almost like every day you see entire industries just becoming obsolete.

And so so there's kinda two things. It's like the financial system is dramatically shifting and transforming, and then you have proliferation of AI and how that's gonna impact new and existing business. So that's really exciting. It's just hard to kinda predict. Right? And then you have, like you said, the the legacy players, your fortune 1,000 companies, your services based businesses across legal and accounting and professional services, and they haven't even caught up to, like, stable coins yet.

They're just getting hit from kind of every corner. And so for me, I think every business, big or small, in the kind of the old way of doing things, and that can be insurance, construction, real estate, these are all industries that really excite us. There needs to be a stablecoin strategy, and there needs to be an AI strategy. And where Entendre fits the best is, hey. Yeah. We're not a rip and replace.

Just point us to what is taking you the most time, or what are the things that you cannot do that we can do on your behalf. And so if you're an accounting firm and you have 500 or 600 clients and majority of them are asking you to account for their crypto or their stable point activity and you don't even have access to their systems or understand their business on chain or, you know, is this deposit into a wallet, a customer liability, or revenue. Right? We abstract that away.

We fit it into nice accounting entries into the GL on their behalf. They can understand and manage and and operate agents across all these different workflows. And then on the AI side, okay. Well, me as a business, I am having trouble finding people to do the work because especially in these legacy industries like accounting, there's just not enough people who are entering the workforce, and more and more people who are in the workforce are retiring. So we're in this unique industry at least for accounting where

So you're saying right now there are less accountants, like, are graduating college with that degree? Exactly. And the numbers are pretty fascinating.

I think by 2030, over, like, 50 of accountants will have retired. And there's what? Maybe, like, 3,000,000 CPAs in the world, and there's, like, a $100,000,000,000,000 of GDP, and say, like, half of that is due to business activity. Right? Still, like, a lot of money to track. Why do you think that's happening? I think a lot of professions are no longer viable. Right? Because if you are even if accounting or accounts are in high demand, people kinda know that ultimately it will be phased out.

And I think you The services around it? Yeah. And and I think if you're also own a accounting based business, you know, you're a partner or COO of a firm, you're thinking about it like this. Like, I still wanna increase my clients. Like, I still wanna be able to regardless of if I can hire or not, I still wanna increase my revenue. And the bottleneck to that is getting the work done and which is indirectly related to your ability to hire.

And so, you know, when we were at CloudKitchens, what was interesting was, you know, restaurants are very low margin businesses. And so at the time, we, you know, pitched this idea. And, again, at the time, it was a little bit of a radioactive topic in 2022, you know, to to undercut the card networks and and do stablecoins, and we thought that, you know, this would help restaurants, you know, earn more money. Right? So people are not gonna be opposed to making more money if it doesn't cost them anything.

And so I think that's kind of where going back to your, like, original question of just, like, what do you advise them on? It's like, look. You need to have a AI strategy. You need to have a stablecoin strategy because you need to increase the pie that's possible for you. And AI will reduce your bottom line, and stablecoin will ultimately increase your top line because you can just service more people, you can build a global business. Again, and then with AI as your foundation, you won't need to hire proportionally

to, you know, your client growth or your revenue growth. Yep. I wanna get into Antondra and the news and all this Yeah. Awesome stuff. The word you used was viability. I think that's a really interesting word in the world of trying to measure where where does viability exist for specific people to be focusing their economic energy. A lot of things right now. This week we've seen a lot of big layoffs happening. I think we're like that is really starting to happen.

I think a lot of companies, a lot of leaders, I don't think in I will also say this, never existed at a more opportunistic and exciting moment and kind of anxious and confused as a generation. Like, feels like both are happening very, very clearly right now. And typically that's not the case. Typically it's like one or the other. It's like doomsday or like all upside, but it really feels like both are kind of happening at the same time. Yeah.

Speak a little bit about the idea of what you believe as someone who's building this kind of modern solution that we'll get into, what is viable? And if you're, you know, you have a younger brother or a friend or whatever going through college or thinking about their career, like Mhmm. What's your advice there? Yeah. So I think

let's just say everyone's in the middle. Everyone's, like, neutral. Right? And you have to pick a lane, like, it's over. Everything's hopeless. Hopefully, the government can give me UBI. Or, hey, like, this is a paradigm shift. I have to take full advantage, and the opportunities are endless. So it's really interesting. In my view, I think you have to be obsessed to the point like bodybuilders. Right? Like, you have to really wanna understand what is the hype around AI.

What are these AI labs actually enabling you to do? And it's not easy. So, like, you know, I remember when, you know, Cloud Code just launched. Right? We obviously, I was using other coding agentic coding solutions. And as a software engineer myself, I've always kept up with my coding abilities, but I didn't sleep for like two days straight. Two, three days straight just trying to figure this out. And like that's kind of the level of obsession.

I think on average, I would sleep for like four four hours, three four hours a day, like, at most a night. And, like, I would just wake up and obsess over it and figuring out, like, what can I do? And, like, how can I use this to my advantage? And I think there's, like, really three levels. So you will be on the optimistic side if you can kinda get to this third level. So the first level is, like, I use ChatGPT kinda like Google, and it's helpful for some things, and I'm using it kind of ad hoc.

That's just not good enough anymore. There has to be a step up. And then there's, like, the second level where it's like, okay, I'm running some things in the background or I'm completing tasks and it requires a lot of my input. It's like a workflow layer. Yeah. You know, maybe I'm using like a Claude Cowork type solution and, you know, I'm trying to just like save some time. And then there's like the third level where it's like, I'm managing multiple concurrently running agents.

I have agents like working in the background while I sleep. People have to understand something like, doesn't even have to just be your job. You can sit there and have it do things that you're just like even interested in or tasks that you think it can't do so you don't even bother trying. No. Like, try. See if it can pay your rent rent or access your vials to find something you were looking for, whatever it might be.

And I think, like, you need to, as soon as possible, like, get to the third level because that's where the optimism is going to really persist and take you, you know, you don't we don't even know where it'll take you, but it's just like that's where you need to get to as a individual. And something that like is a little bit scary that I read, which like got me in this mindset was one hour of your time today is the equivalent of someone's lifetime of productivity a hundred years ago. In terms of what's possible?

Yeah. Like Like, what you can accomplish at layer three. Exactly. It's like One hour of your time, like, you could complete something And this has always been the case with technology and advancement. Like, people used to get on ships and risk their life to, like, do a deal. Yeah. You know what I mean? Exactly. But with AI, it's even more obvious and it's it's compounding even more aggressively.

Like, yes, we had the Internet, and we had, like, cell phones, and things were more efficient, but, like, you still, like, were limited really, truly limited with your time because business hours, like, the hardware and the technology wasn't, like, always there. Like, the iPhone obviously became, like, that next, like, paradigm shift of productivity. Yeah. Think of it like an iPhone. Like, imagine you just refuse to buy an iPhone so you can't read emails or market your product or, you know, dial into a video call.

It's kind of the equivalent with, like, AI. Imagine, like, again, you're just still on, like, your LG chocolate or your, like, your Razer or whatever Yeah. Or whatever, BlackBerry while everyone else is, you know, getting ahead and the gap is now exponentially

increasing. It's accelerating that gap. So so the takeaway would be maybe just specifically to someone. Let's say that you're listening to this and you're getting your master's in accounting. Mhmm. You need to get to the level that level as fast as possible. Yeah. Because the function commercially of that role isn't going away. Yeah. But the speed in which you will need to produce and move and operate will you will be competing with other people at that level.

It's It's the peptide thing I was joking about. Like, you know What? Say say it again. No. It was like before we got on, I was like, yeah. I don't know much about peptides, but, like, seeing people lose 30 pounds and gaining, like, five pounds of muscle in six weeks. It's like AI is like the peptides for your professional career. Right? Like, if everyone's gonna take it and you're the only one who's not taking it, like, how are you gonna stay competitive? Right? And it's just like

Yeah. I'm so glad I'm married. Yeah. Yeah. For all our for all our single our single friends out there, man. It's getting competitive out there. Yeah. So okay. So let's bridge into the the world of Entendre. So, you know, you've spent learning about this, fascinating over this. You are build you're you now are at that level as a as a professional, as a founder.

What was the moment to go start on Tantra? And and where did that begin? And give us a little bit of the origin story there. Yeah. We all, you know, got put in a room when I when I was at Cloud Kitchens, and the number one thing was making restaurants profitable. And I understood from my experiences at WeWork and Workday how important, you know, back office systems and hygiene and health was. And I was like, okay, well, look, I already know there's a bunch of people trying to solve payments for stablecoins.

Like, I know that's something that is like the first Using these things in that context. Correct. Exactly. Like, just, like, accepting payments, sending payments, we get that's an important aspect that will enable like, that's the product market fit of stablecoins. But if I were to go pitch this to someone, like, what is the reason they would say no? And it would be like, well, it's it's crypto. I don't understand it, or how does this fit with my existing stack? What's it gonna cost me to manage?

These were, like, the things that were even as a payments person, you would get pushback from your own team within your organization for just trying to introduce, like, a new payment method or payment provider. Like, it took us, like, six months to sign Stripe at Cloud Kitchens. And it was, like, because we had to do our diligence and figure out how it works and how many markets we can cover with it. Just to use them as for for payments. For payments. Yeah.

And so imagine, like, now you're coming in with something completely new and it's just like the sell is it was again, it just took took a long time, and we we got to see that firsthand with the customers that we have been lucky to work with that it just took a long time for people to catch up to where the technology was. Right? Yep. So that motivated me to start Entendre, and that was around the time that ChatGPT launched. And so I was like, okay.

I mean, this is everything that I learned and everything that I had built in the past didn't have those two things. I mean, I literally we had to build the pipes and the plumbing for, like, all of the different payment flows plus all the accounting that comes with it. And what's, like, fascinating to me was, like, from an accounting perspective, yeah, you received that payment, but that payment could be for twelve months of services that you haven't rendered yet.

So what what does that payment now create so much overhead? Because now you have to defer revenue, and then you have to recognize revenue, and then, well, the jail didn't get updated, and this customer churned, and we have to refund them. Or it just becomes like the anatomy of a payment after it's been collected becomes very interesting. So me and the founding team from when we started Who who are you doing this with? Yeah. Omar, who's our head of engineering cabins.

Me and my brother, I worked with him for a long time. Like, I was the youngest engineer at Workday. He was actually the youngest engineer at Cloud Kitchens, so he's actually my younger brother. And then Andy, who's our head of design, he used to lead the web design team at Hulu. And then when it got acquired by Disney, and then he was my designer at Cloud Kitchens working on payments and fintech at Cloud Kitchens, so building financial products for restaurants. And so it's been us three.

And, obviously, we've had teammates come and go and and some really smart contractors and project based folks. Yeah. It's been us for It four blows me away that essentially three guys

Yeah. Have been able to build this. Yeah. A lot of people often will ask, and I'm sure you get this a lot, like, it's sort of like a badge of honor, like, how many people you work with. Like, a lot of people in my family are like, hey, how's the business going? Like, how many people you work with now? It's like, like five, ten? And they're like, well, you must not be doing that well. You know what I mean?

And it's like, there's sort of a weird sense of like how many people to how successful you are getting, which is, I guess, reasonable. Yeah. But that's not really accurate anymore. Like, what you guys have built with three people is absolutely

remarkable to me. Yeah. Absolutely remarkable. Yeah. I think it's the first time it's occurred in accounting software, for sure, to have helped companies go from c to series a, b, and c, customers pass audits with Mastercard and Visa, help customers, like I mentioned, raise astronomical rounds. What was the fact that you said you shared yesterday? That was crazy. Yeah. So in the last twelve months, our customers have raised over 1,000,000,000 in venture capital.

These are existing customers, and it's not their first round. So our customers are extremely well capitalized. Some that I actually even forgot to mention were like Courtyard, which is like one of the fastest growing Marketplace. Marketplaces using stablecoins. Shout out Courtyard. Yeah. Yeah.

You guys work with Coinflow?

Well, no. But we serve a lot of the partners that Coinflow supports, and we see the the volumes Yeah. Which is really cool. Okay. So I I We keep skipping ahead of like Okay. So define

you know, when you were building this out, you realized, I'm I'm obsessed with this accounting problem. I know the rails here. I've built this type of stuff within cloud kitchens. I've seen the kind of turmoil that can exist at scale with WeWork and, like, we know that this is a huge problem. You gotta get right. What was the starting place for you guys? You three come together. You're starting this business. Where did you start from first principles? Like, how did you architect this?

And what were some of those first I think the customers you've picked are also really interesting in terms of the personas of them building their businesses natively with these rails too Yeah. To create the growth and building with them. Yeah, bring

principles of where you started. What we focused on when we first raised our our funding round was digital assets, stablecoins, crypto companies, because they were very unique to companies like WeWork and Cloud Kitchens in that they had many legal entities and many financial accounts. So that was, like, a wedge that I felt like if we can solve the complexities of accounting and bookkeeping from with with brand new technology for very modern, like, fast growing businesses.

And another thing that I really appreciate about these customers were because they're already on the frontier of tech and, like, they're building something that, you know, there was so much uncertainty around, when we tell them, hey. Like, do you want AI to, like, automate your your bookkeeping? They're like, yeah. That sounds like something we we would wanna do because they're already building in stablecoins. They might be shut down the next day. Like, who who knows? Right? Like, it was very uncertain.

People didn't have the time or the bandwidth to, like, worry about their books, but they also understood that, like, we had to be it was, like, very core to their business that they knew what was going on. Absolutely. Yeah. So And you and these customers,

you specifically, it looks like have picked, like, infrastructure companies. Talk a little bit about the customer base you've built and maybe the complexity of those types of companies. Yeah. So what's interesting is if we can solve

this pain point for a infrastructure company where they serve many businesses, it's almost very similar to, like, us serving accounting firms, which, again, serve many businesses. They're the most complex. We wanna make sure that there isn't anything we couldn't automate from a complexity standpoint. So when we go and we service their customers as a result, so, like, let's say they refer us business, like, hey, yeah, we use, you know, Entendre. You guys should check them out.

It's very simple because those end consumers, which are other businesses for, like, a Braille, Arrayn, Polygon, whatever, double zero, there's there's a few that are very good channels for us. The underpinnings are solid, and those consumers have very basic accounting flows. Right? They're able to focus on their core business because these infrastructure companies have handled all the financial complexity and regulatory insulation that's required.

And then we come in and say, well, yeah, we did this at scale for, you know, Polygon Labs. We can do this for you. And so because your entity structure or the volume of accounts that you have to manage are just way way more they're they're much more simpler than, like, to say, like, a Braille that might have, you know, 300 accounts that they have to manage between multiple blockchains and and on and off ramps. Yeah.

Let's break if if you're open to it, I'd love to just break down, like, pick one of these customers or case studies and, like, walk us through

the problem, solution, and outcome. Like, what were they going through? What did you do? How did Entendre fit in? Yeah. So I always like you We love all these companies, by the way. Like, a lot of friends of show and the mess. So you can't really pick a loser here. Yeah. Let's just use, like, Polygon Labs, like, a very quick example.

They have 32 legal entities, and we're probably the only pre seed seed stage company in history to have a product that could support an organization with billions in market cap and that many legal entities with a full mature, like, you know, accounting organization and a controller and a CFO. And, yeah, that's like a testament to what we've built.

But, like, if we're going through kind of what we've solved, it's like, man, providing liquidity, transferring your treasury between blockchains on and off ramping to pay bills, minting new tokens. All of these things have, like, an accounting impact. Not just stablecoins. All tokens. Yeah. Exactly. Unrealized and realized gain losses. And, hey, if we can solve that, yeah, you know, your stablecoin workflows are gonna be very straightforward for us.

And it's just like an integration, you know, discussion more than it is like a fundamental accounting discussion around how this should should work. And we got so good at what we were doing to the point where we started to take other workflows like accounts payable and expense accounting and basically just booking that all into NetSuite, which has like zero compatibility with anything on on the digital asset side. These systems are so archaic and there's not even teams within

these legacy players that are even thinking about, you know, stablecoins. But there's still NetSuite, for example, or or others like them are still needed at the bedrock of

the GL. Yeah. You're saying? Yeah. For exactly. Going back to the GL discussion, I'm by no means going to go to a multibillion dollar organization and tell them, hey, like, you should just stop using NetSuite. No matter what our personal opinion of it is, like, they also know that it's not great. So but let's just make it painless. Like, let's make it so that it doesn't really matter, and let's make these GLs essentially just glorified databases. Right?

And, obviously, like, I'm sure you're aware of, like, recent fundraising announcements of, like, these new ERPs, AI native ERPs. I am not. Who who's who's doing that? Yeah. So we just recently announced a partnership with Dual Entry, and they're, like, an AI native ERP. They they raised, you know, like, $90,000,000. Dual entry? Yeah. But, again, they're, again, very, very focused on all the baggage that comes with the GL. Right?

And all the things that you have to get to parity to be able to bring on real enterprise adoption of your GL. And we because, you know, we have mutual customers, one of them, like, for example, being Braille, we partnered with them to basically be their stablecoin accounting arm of just solving this problem for them for Braille and making dual entry again one cohesive general ledger that has all of your fiat and your stable points. Yeah.

So so interesting. Yeah. Bring bring us bring us into the news now. So what happened? Where are you at? What are you excited about? Yeah. I'm just learning about this, but yeah. Tell us about this news and how this came to be. Yeah. So

we are

It's funny to, like, talk about the future as if, like, people are gonna be listening to this. Yeah. We're I can I can talk as if it happened? Yeah.

Yeah. So we're getting acquired by MoonPay, and we're really excited about the opportunity because they're really building the future of financial infrastructure across all aspects of finance, and we play a pivotal role in that.

And as we push the needle on stablecoin adoption, as we see the transformation of financial system happening in real time, we felt like this was the right place to build that in a holistic ecosystem that anyone can just, like, turnkey pull from the shelf and just be able to start operating their business globally with stablecoins. And eventually, stablecoins and dollars would just be one in the same, and and we're seeing that the future is now, like, very certain on that happening, and we wanted to go somewhere.

Or if we were going to take this approach and work with a larger partner, we wanted to make sure that we're aligned on that exact vision where it's not really gonna matter, and we need to make sure that we are the operating system of the future and also from an agentic perspective, building the operating system for finance of the future for agents specifically. Because I think that is the end goal. Right? Yeah.

Humans should not be doing the grunt work for this new financial system that is going to ultimately replace the old one, and it's gonna happen sooner than we think. Yeah. MoonPay is such an incredible organization. Their history is rich. Yeah. Their business lines are

deep and increasingly wide. What makes them a a good acquirer here? Like, what what makes you excited to go work with them on this? Well, I think their business is really exciting, especially with Iron, with Sodot, with D Flow, MoonPay Commerce. Like, there's so much synergy.

And what I'm excited about, again, is the fact that they saw how important Entendre was as, like, really core infrastructure for everything that they're building, and it was a gap that they felt was extremely important to get right and a reason again for institutions to not say no. Right? Why are we not adopting this amazing technology? Why are we not able to operate an efficient business with this technology? Right? And that's where okay.

Well, let's do this thing and let's partner together and make it so that future financial system is truly inevitable and it's coming and people need to, like, hedge their bets and and start making decisions quickly. Yeah. So you mentioned a handful of these entities or, like, partners within MoonPay that are probably amazing potential customers for Entendre. Yeah. As a part of this deal, is it kind of gonna work where Entendre will be servicing MoonPay internally as a part of MoonPay?

All of the benefits of of Entendre will kind of be in house to them. But will it still exist independently and be able to kind of Yeah. Go out to market on its own? Entendre will remain, you know, an independent brand and and business for the time being. I think there will ultimately be future plans where we're just this big amorphous AI blob that just does everything for you. But sooner than later.

But, like, right now, we'll see where the world takes us, especially with the advancements of the the models and how quickly things are are moving from UI to MCPs to CLIs and just how you need to start actually building product for agents. And that's, again, why I'm very excited about working with Ivan and MoonPay because, again, that's 100%, like, what they're optimizing for at this point. And I think that's gonna make us, like, you know, put us in the real shot to be the winner here. It's amazing. What now?

So this this news is public. Yeah. Congrats, by the way. I I mean, that's what an what an amazing moment. What are you gonna do now? Like, what's the next step?

Yeah. So I think we're gonna continue to push the needle for our customers. We're gonna continue to automate more and more of their financial workflows. We're gonna double down on our AI capabilities, and then we're gonna double down on integrating more into the ecosystem within MoonPay. To your point, yes, like MoonPay will be adopting Entendre internally. That's something that the team is excited about.

And more and more enterprises are you're gonna see in the near future, you know, partner with Entendre to to handle their stablecoin accounting. And then in the, know, in the very near future, the majority of their accounting. I think that's the the wedge, and we will continue to expand our partnerships with traditional legacy software and new age AI native, you know, software like Dual Entry. And and, yeah, I think we're gonna, you know, help usher in the the stablecoin era

of finance. Yeah. This is your first exit as a founder. First startup. First IT. First time raising venture capital. Yeah. Amazing. What does it feel like compared to think a lot of founders right now are listening to this, and they're in the trenches. They're building. They're considering maybe starting something new. What's

it like going through this? Kind of being now in the in the process of it. Yeah. I would say the takeaway for rounders is this is the most exciting time to be one. And bet on yourself and be obsessed about this technology because you're not too late. This is still the first inning of AI and what it can do. And I'm really excited for even just industrial AI. Like, I always joke, like, what's next after for vertical SaaS for me?

Like, longer term, I would say, like, I'd love to just start applying AI to things like mining and construction and, you know, I think there's just a lot of opportunity. And I think if you're a founder today, just know that, like, you could accomplish what founders took years to accomplish. You can accomplish them in a fraction of the time. You just have to make sure you're pointing your cannon at the right problem. What

do you think was the main thing that you did right to make this company worth? Like, what what were those things that you think maybe specifically for Entendre, but also, like, guidance to other people building things that ultimately, like, what what are we doing here? We're trying to build things that are valuable.

Yeah. So what what did that look like for you, and what's your advice to others who might be wanting to build something? Yeah. I would say, like, experience is important. Like, start with something you're good at. Start with a problem that you're really good at. I think as long as it's a problem we're solving, like, you should use and tap into your experience. And then I think build building a very strong team, but that is also variable. Right? Like, we discussed it before.

Like, you don't need fifteen, twenty people to accomplish what you think you can accomplish. You can try to everything you wanna accomplish, try to accomplish it with a fraction of the resources. Yeah. Quad's your best friend. So yeah. Why aren't more people starting things, do you think? I mean, there are more founders, I think, than ever before, but maybe for the people who are anxious

or have existing cushion with an existing job who might feel safe, what would what would your thoughts be to them? Like, I think for me, it's

you need to get to that when we were talking about levels. Right? Like, you just need to get to level three as fast as possible because the alternative is is is actually very bleak, I would say. And like you mentioned, like, the tech layoffs and and things like that. Like, I mean and I like, Coinbase just announced, like, a pretty big round of Yep. Yeah. I think all of those people should start something.

I think, literally, there should be like, I think don't continue to play musical chairs with your future and try to join large organizations that are all essentially going to follow this model that, you know, Jack Dorsey just did with Block and Amazon and Oracle and and Meta. I mean, it's just funny. We always talk about startups being risky. I actually think it's the least risky thing you can do in today's age.

I think putting your fate in the hands of, like, these kind of soulless, very large organizations is a risk for sure. And I think you have to make sure that your skill set is indispensable.

And one way to do that very fast is to be a founder. So What would you go build, or what what do you see as someone who's operated in the market? Yeah. Maybe specifically to digital asset, tokenization, stablecoin. Mhmm.

You've been, I think, done a really, really good job of not focusing where, like like, you built on Tundra not as another payments thing with stablecoins, but as a almost looking around the corner of, okay, once all those people go be successful and compete for the winnings, what are they going to need? Well, they're going to need on Tundra. Like, what do you think now if someone is starting from scratch? Yeah.

What are some of these areas that you think might be around the corner today that that people could go build and solve for? Yeah, man. That's a great

that's a great question. I think there's still a lot of, like, untapped efficiencies. I think from, again, from an operational standpoint, like automating verticals that like, oh, I think right now, like, a lot of people are trying to solve, like, treasury and, like, treasury management. But, again, there's still collections and revenue, which are going to need a an overhaul because stablecoins are coming. Right? Mhmm.

The way that you invoice and the way that you manage your revenue accounting, I think, will be a big one. And how maybe, like, contracts could change the behavior of a Stablecoin payment. I think, like, things like that could be really interesting. Never been too deep in payroll myself, but I just think there's also, like, an opportunity there with Stablecoins just being the default. But then ultimately, like, the employee at the end of the day, you know, gets it in whatever format that they want.

So if you look at, like, accounting as, like, the horizontal layer, there's just, like, all these pillars that live above it. You can then break it down even further by industry because contracts and and revenue and income and and and all of that for a business in construction or real estate or insurance is very different from, say, subscription, SaaS, ecommerce, and I think latter ones like subscription based and SaaS based models are already very saturated.

So I would just say, like, go and explore how very archaically run companies are doing things and and and see how stablecoins and crypto and blockchains can apply. Yeah. Do you see something like Entendre being a

almost like I I think even though this acquisition is in place, like, the idea of Entendre and the up the potential for it is so massive and still so early and untapped. Mhmm. Like, this is not the end of the of Entendre by any means, it sounds like. And Yeah.

Have you thought about the kind of go to market approach of even I'm almost imagining, like, for these big industries to resonate with them deeply and almost, like, penetrate faster to almost create teams or people that can, like, go and champion what is possible to a specific market? Like, have you thought about stuff like that? Yeah. I think

a little bit of a history lesson is there's been a large push on, you know, for all these legacy softwares, there was, like, entire economies built on top of them of, like, consultants and implementation specialists and Systems integration,

ISVs.

Yeah. All of that needs to just be completely shipped away. And once that happens, we can pinpoint exactly those friction to onboard these businesses much easier. Because again, there's no incentives other than, like, getting you up to speed as fast as possible. So the age of the consultant implementer type, a boutique firm that, like, charges you millions of dollars on top of already a million millions of dollars of contracts for for your accounting stack to kinda have it all work together. That's gonna go away.

And just like stablecoins are deflationary for consumers and and businesses, Entendre is deflationary for,

you know, our consumer and businesses that we partner with. Yeah. Last question here, sort of framing and Yeah. Helping people understand where Entendre fits. So we and we've covered some of these businesses, but there are some interesting and innovative companies in the stack around this conversation that we've seen in recent years. The names that are coming to my mind right now are like I just saw Pat from Bitwave last night at a thing and you have integrals of the world, tax bits.

Like, you have this sort of software, crypto as well. Yeah. You have these, like, really interesting software companies and companies taking that approach. How do you compare or contrast what they're doing Yeah. To what Entendre's doing? Because it seems similar but different to me. Yeah. I think, like,

a lot of the names that you mentioned were kind of existed before Entendre for many years. Right? Yeah. And I think the most important question for any business that kind of began a little bit too early for stablecoins, but also a little bit too early for AI. And Yeah. Kinda like that 2017 to, like, 2021 time period. It's just like how fast can you really AIify your product and how you operate. Right?

Traditionally, you needed a $10,000,000 P and L line item for engineering to be able to build something compelling in the back office space because, again, it just required so much bespoke integration and bespoke feature sets for, like, very specific customers, and a lot of enterprise negotiations required new functionality before they can sign on for an annual or multiyear contract. That all went away when we hit the market because we were able to iterate so much faster.

And we struggled in the beginning because the infrastructure just wasn't there yet because it took for example, at the time, agents weren't called agents. It was a API call to the LLM. You hope the output was usable, then you had to format the output, and there's all these different paradigms to try to build AI products. And so we were there for OpenAI's assistance API that they deprecated after, like, six six months. We were there for the big, you know, VectorDB rag hype, and, you know, it just evolved over time.

And once the infrastructure got to a point where it was mature enough, that's when we started to grow. I mean, like, increased revenue by 10 x, blew the cap off on our growth, and that was kind of the inflection point, and that happened at the beginning of 2025. Yeah. And so we were just very meticulous about figuring that out. If you're an organization that existed before that, it's like, well, how motivated and how quickly can you do the same?

And it's obviously very difficult as you get bigger, and so that's why smaller teams are gonna win and AI first, AI pilled, AI native teams are gonna be outpaced and outcompete a lot of these legacy guys. Amazing. Yeah. Amazing.

Well, absolutely congrats on this news and appreciate you sharing this with us and giving us the opportunity to bring people into this and get get into the story and the the current moment. What would be the, yeah, the invitation into this? Like, how can people get involved? What what is the what kind of companies specifically right now are you trying to talk with most? Yeah. What what is the final invitation to the market? Or or the random weirdos on x who might be watching this still. Yeah. Look.

If you're if you're interested in the same things that I am around accounting, the transformation

of financial systems, like, just DM me, reach out. We are hiring. Our jobs page is in under construction, but by the time this gets added Who are you hiring right now? We're hiring a lot of AI engineering. Shocker. Yeah. A lot of layer threes. A little layer. We're gonna need some folks to do some internal agent development for us.

We're building a lot of internal tooling to monitor our product's performance, the satisfaction of our agents' conversations with our customers, and we wanna create, like, a self learning loop and make all of our operations pretty efficient. And then, obviously, we we we need some forward deployed guys who can sit with customers and gals, of course, but to sit with customers and be able to just solve problems very quickly on top of the backbone of our platform. Awesome. Yeah. So exciting, man.

Kareem, thanks for the time. Thank you for having me. It's fun.