# MoonPay acquires Entendre, the AI accounting platform for stablecoin activity Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Jul 2, 2026. Kareem Khattab. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/inside-moonpays-newest-acquisition-building-ai-accounting-jYTtJLPAGQQ Founder Kareem Khattab says on-chain stablecoin activity has to reach the general ledger, and that small AI-native teams will beat legacy firms. Entendre, an AI accounting platform for stablecoins, is being acquired by MoonPay, founder Kareem Khattab said. "We play a pivotal role in that," he said of MoonPay's push into financial infrastructure. Khattab says Entendre customers raised over a billion in venture capital in the last 12 months. ## Why the ledger matters Kareem Khattab argues the general ledger is the final source of truth before companies report to the street or to their boards. "If it wasn't in the GL, it didn't happen," he said. He predicts stablecoins and dollars will become one and the same, and says all on-chain stablecoin activity has to get to the GL. He learned this on the cash management, banking and settlements team at Workday, where he spent three years. At WeWork, he says, over 300 full-time accountants and multiple consulting firms were trying to solve the company's accounting. He then joined Cloud Kitchens early on the product team and helped build an entire money platform there. ## Small team, complex customers Kareem Khattab says the launch of ChatGPT prompted him to start Entendre. He built it with his younger brother Omar Khattab, head of engineering, and Andy, head of design, who led web design at Hulu. Khattab says the three have run the company for four years. Entendre started with crypto infrastructure firms. Polygon Labs has 32 legal entities, Khattab says. The company also announced a partnership with Dual Entry, an AI-native ERP that he says raised $90 million. ## Inside MoonPay Kareem Khattab says Entendre is not a rip-and-replace product. He describes stablecoin accounting as the wedge and expects the company to handle the majority of customers' accounting in the very near future. ## AI and the accounting shortage Kareem Khattab says over 50% of accountants will have retired by 2030, with maybe 3 million CPAs worldwide against $100 trillion of GDP. He says every business needs both a stablecoin strategy and an AI strategy. He describes three levels of AI use, ending with managing multiple concurrent agents, and urges people to reach level three as fast as possible. Kareem Khattab expects the era of consultants charging millions to implement accounting software to end, and says Entendre only grew once AI infrastructure was mature enough. He tells laid-off tech workers that starting a company is the least risky thing they can do today. ## Key takeaways 1. Kareem Khattab says Entendre is being acquired by MoonPay, which he describes as building the future of financial infrastructure. 2. Entendre pitches itself as an augmentation of existing accounting systems, not a rip-and-replace, and has partnered with AI-native ERP Dual Entry. 3. Kareem Khattab says revenue grew 10x at the beginning of 2025 once AI infrastructure matured, and predicts smaller AI-native teams will outcompete incumbents. ## Chapters - 0:00 Preview of the MoonPay deal and the stablecoin accounting thesis - 2:17 Workday taught Kareem how ERP and cash systems work - 5:59 Whoever owns the general ledger controls the finance stack - 8:44 WeWork and Cloud Kitchens showed multi-entity accounting at scale - 15:42 Every legacy business needs an AI and stablecoin strategy - 21:20 Individuals must reach the third level of AI use - 27:00 Entendre began from Cloud Kitchens payments pain and ChatGPT - 31:06 Starting with crypto infrastructure firms made complexity the wedge - 38:28 MoonPay acquires Entendre, which stays an independent brand - 43:16 Founding a company is now the least risky career move - 48:51 AI-native small teams will replace consultants and older crypto tools - 53:13 Entendre is hiring AI engineers and forward deployed staff ## Transcript **Kareem Khattab** (0:01) 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 million CPAs in the world and there's like 100 trillion dollars 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. **Drew Rogers** (0:57) www.stabledash.com **Drew Rogers** (1:03) 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 just coming **Kareem Khattab** (1:34) in. I saw the picture of the studio. I was like, all right, let's give it a go. **Drew Rogers** (1:41) I **Kareem Khattab** (1:41) moved every customer call. I'm like, hey guys, sorry, I'm at consensus. Even though I wasn't planning on it. Thanks for doing **Drew Rogers** (1:48) this. **Kareem Khattab** (1:48) No, of course. **Drew Rogers** (1:49) I'm excited to get into, I know we talked yesterday on the live show, and thank you for that, but that was pretty fast and we only had like 10 minutes. So 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 just the basics of your background and how you really came across this problem that you are now solving. We'll start with the intro. **Kareem Khattab** (2:17) Yeah, absolutely. I have a very interesting career in that I've just only been working in accounting and I'm not a CPA. I 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. **Drew Rogers** (2:42) What is Workday for people who don't **Kareem Khattab** (2:44) know? Yeah, so it's a Fortune 50 company. **Drew Rogers** (2:47) Fortune 50? **Kareem Khattab** (2:48) Yeah. Huge. Well, maybe not now after Claude. After Anthropic is just coming out. When you were there. **Drew Rogers** (2:53) Well, when I was there, **Kareem Khattab** (2:54) yeah, it was like a $50, $60 billion market cap. But I mean, 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 had spun out from PeopleSoft when Oracle took it over. And so that team ended up creating Workday. And what was really cool about working there was understanding the history of accounting software and how it all came to be. What went from having your financial data as a CFO 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 in the hands of other people. Oracle would come in and do 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. 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 you know in Brazil and then SAP in Europe and you had all these different sources of truth across 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 **Kareem Khattab** (4:23) I spent a good amount of time working on very financially heavy accounting workflows like book-to-bank reconciliation, cash positioning, cash forecasting. **Drew Rogers** (4:35) You became like, you became an expert at this type of, these rails. **Kareem Khattab** (4:40) As someone, as actually as an intern, so I actually was there as an intern. They extended my internship. I became, 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 and I was the youngest engineer on the financial side. **Drew Rogers** (4:56) And you stayed there after graduation. Yeah, I **Kareem Khattab** (4:57) 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 WorkTools of the world were 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 this stuff was and working with accountants. When I was there, some of our top customers were like Netflix and J.B. Hunt. And so I was working with those finance teams and controllers to Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, BVNK, Dani Vilardell, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live. **Drew Rogers** (5:59) What are the parallels that you see in terms of the role that Workday played with cloud and riding that wave? What kind of parallels do you see happening now with agents and information and data? I feel like we're going through a really interesting, maybe similar moment with what cloud was for physical racks in your building. A lot of teams and even some of the past guests that we've had on the show, shout out to Nikhil and Infinite. Go back and listen to that episode. It was really interesting. A lot of founders were 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 what you've built is kind of right at the forefront of that. Do you see those two things as similar shifts? **Kareem Khattab** (6:44) Yeah, so I love geeking out on the history of this because 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 **Drew Rogers** (7:05) Why were people fighting over it? What does that mean? Because if you **Kareem Khattab** (7:08) were the general ledger back in the day, you were the final stop, the truth, before you report to the street, before board meetings, management reporting. If it wasn't in the GL, it didn't happen. And we can get into it, but getting all of this activity that's happening now on-chain with Stablecoin, smart contracts, on-off ramps, deposits all of that like it has to get somewhere it has to get to the gl and uh 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 retention, 10-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? Just use our native AP tool that already integrates with the GL. Oh, use our invoicing solution because all of this revenue accounting that you're doing outside of our system ultimately have to manually 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 Neobank or new banks like Slash, where they're all trying to solve this bookkeeping problem because they're- Preston Pysh, It's a really sticky **Drew Rogers** (8:44) problem. Drew Rogers, Exactly. Preston Pysh, Really sticky. 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 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. It's interesting how what you've ended up building was in some ways a very direct result of that probably very weird and niche fascination with the history of accounting and how these things work. It takes that level of curiosity. What was it about this industry that made it worth it? You have spent years of your life understanding this space even though you didn't it sounds like you didn't go to school to be an accountant you were a software engineer yeah like what what was it about this **Kareem Khattab** (9:41) yeah so um **Drew Rogers** (9:43) we'll come back to slash and ramp and all this stuff because there's so much there but like **Kareem Khattab** (9:46) yeah no no this is a great um it's a very technical problem and that's what i am good at i'm good at solving technical problems i like doing the hardest things i can find and this was like radioactive Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Kareem Khattab** (10:15) 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 experience for me where not a lot of people get to enter something at the very, very tip top. Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Drew Rogers** (10:58) I've watched all of the WeWork things. I've found it completely fascinating. I don't know if you saw the latest Rick Rubin interview. I saw a couple clips with Adam from that. Anyway, there's such a wild moment to be entering this. What did they ask you to do? What was the thing that you were trying to accomplish that was too late? **Kareem Khattab** (11:16) Yeah, so it's funny. It's kind of like every step of the way 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&L. **Drew Rogers** (11:39) Bank **Kareem Khattab** (11:40) accounts **Drew Rogers** (11:41) in those regions that they were **Kareem Khattab** (11:42) in. In the US, say, I don't know the number, but say there was 100 office spaces. That was 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 JP Morgan, you're going to lend to WeWork, but you only want your cash stored in the locations that you're lending to. You don't want 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, these lenders want to know that they would be able to recover their loans. And so this is something that on a very global scale is tens of trillions of dollars and this is extremely difficult to solve and now it's extremely possible in 10 years later. You know, this is the big opportunity. This is how you're going to 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. And we had multiple consulting firms, Deloitte, Grant Borton, 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 were able to kind **Drew Rogers** (13:31) of write Trey Lockerbie, Jr.: **Kareem Khattab** (13:35) Exactly. I mean, we had general managers banging on our door demanding that we onboard their facilities into our platform because we were able to just from first principles design this before it became already a $50 billion global business when we were at WeWork. And this also relates to payments. We were trying to unlock markets like Vietnam and Russia and the facilities would have been were already or 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 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 stable coins and all that which is obviously a massive problem that is worth solving and is being solved very well but i think the wall that kind of everyone stops is that like What are you most grateful for when you look back at the WeWork chapter of your career? **Kareem Khattab** (14:53) I mean, 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. Regardless of the outcome, it was still, at least for WeWork, like the relationships I built, the things that I learned about scaling companies, you know, I'm never going to learn that anywhere else. And probably the, I mean, the most recent example I can think of is like FTX, right? But it's not very often you get to be kind of on the inside of the tornado or like eye of the storm. And so that's a unique thing that I'm thankful for. **Drew Rogers** (15:42) Yeah, so framing, I mean, we could rabbit hole what it was like to work with them. I'll talk about that later because I'm really interested in those two specifically. You have these two use cases, and maybe we're kind of bringing back the altitudes and slashes and people like that. You have those types of companies that are growing extremely fast. They're building financial products. A lot of them are doing things with stablecoins and are kind of going from first principles on chain. And it seems like companies like Rain, Braille, 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 What would be your advice or your guidance to the larger of the group? What would you recommend they do or how to think about **Kareem Khattab** (16:49) this? What's interesting is you have to, as a founder, make a bet. And I believe a lot of these new businesses that you mentioned, like the slashes of the world, they're going to be massive businesses and they're going to be core infrastructure for future companies. But that is a very long game that you have to play. And it's going to and I would say there's still kind of a lot of unknowns and just like where the world's going to 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 there's kind of two things. It's like the financial system is dramatically shifting and transforming, and then you have proliferation of AI and how that's going to impact new and existing business. So that's really exciting. It's just hard to kind of predict, right? And then you have, like you said, the legacy players, your Fortune 1000 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 stable coin 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 stablecoin 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 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 **Drew Rogers** (19:16) So you're saying right now there are less accountants who are graduating college with that degree? **Kareem Khattab** (19:21) 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 million CPAs in the world? And there's like $100 trillion of GDP and say like half of that is due to business activity, right? Still like a lot of money to track. **Drew Rogers** (19:41) Why do you think that's happening? **Kareem Khattab** (19:44) a lot of professions are no longer viable right because if you are even if accounting or accounts are in high demand people kind of know that ultimately it will be phased out and i think you have **Drew Rogers** (19:58) services around it **Kareem Khattab** (19:59) yeah 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 want to increase my clients. I still want to be able to, regardless of if I can hire or not, I still want to increase my revenue. And the bottleneck to that is getting the work done, which is indirectly related to your ability to hire. And so when we were at Cloud Kitchens, 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, **Drew Rogers** (20:37) you know, **Kareem Khattab** (20:37) to undercut the card networks and do stablecoins. And we thought that, you know, this would help restaurants, you know, earn more money, right? So people are not going to 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 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 You can 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. **Drew Rogers** (21:20) Yeah. I want to get into entendre and the news and all this 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 that it's really starting to happen like i think a lot of companies a lot of leaders i don't think in i'll say this i've never existed at a more opportunistic and exciting moment and like kind of anxious and confused as a generation like it 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 **Kareem Khattab** (22:09) yeah **Drew Rogers** (22:10) 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 friend or whatever going through college or thinking about their career like what's your advice there **Kareem Khattab** (22:28) 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. 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 want to 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? 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 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. you will be on the optimistic side if you can kind of get to this third level so the first level is like i use chat gbt kind of 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 this 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 but like a **Drew Rogers** (24:02) workflow layer **Kareem Khattab** (24:02) Yeah. You know, maybe I'm using like a cloud co-work 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. It doesn't even have to just be your job. You can sit there and have it do things that you're just even interested in or tasks that you think it can't do so you don't even bother trying. No, try. See if it can pay your rent or access your files to find something you were looking for, whatever it might be. And I think you need to, as soon as possible, get to the third level because that's where the optimism is going to really persist and take you We don't even know where it'll take you, but it's just like that's where you need to get to as an individual. And something that is a little bit scary that I read, which got me in this mindset, was one hour of your time today is the equivalent of someone's lifetime of productivity 100 years ago. **Drew Rogers** (25:02) In terms of what's possible? **Kareem Khattab** (25:04) Yeah. Like **Drew Rogers** (25:05) what you can accomplish at layer three. Exactly. **Kareem Khattab** (25:09) One hour of your time, you could complete something. And this has always been **Drew Rogers** (25:13) the case with technology and advancement. People used to get on ships and risk their life to do a deal. Exactly. **Kareem Khattab** (25:22) But with AI, it's even more obvious and 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. Imagine you just refuse to buy an iPhone so you can't read emails or market your product or dial into a video call. It's kind of the equivalent with AI. Imagine, again, you're just still on your LG chocolate or your Razer or whatever. So the **Drew Rogers** (26:10) takeaway would be maybe just specifically to someone let's say that you're listening to this and you're getting your masters in accounting 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 Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Kareem Khattab** (26:48) 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... **Drew Rogers** (27:00) I'm so glad I'm married. For all our single friends out there, man, it's getting competitive out there. Let's bridge into the world of Entendre. You've spent learning about this, fascinating over this. You now are at that level as a professional, as a founder. What was the aha moment to go start Entendre? Where did that begin? Give us a little bit of the origin story there. **Kareem Khattab** (27:30) Yeah, we all got put in a room 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 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. I know that's something that is like the first... Using **Drew Rogers** (27:53) these things in that context. **Kareem Khattab** (27:55) 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 crypto, I don't understand it. How does this fit with my existing stack? What's it going to 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 **Drew Rogers** (28:37) use them as for payments. **Kareem Khattab** (28:38) 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 a long time. And we got to see that firsthand with the customers that we have been lucky to work with. That just took a long time for people to catch up to where the technology was, right? So that motivated me to start on Tondra. 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 12 months of services that you haven't rendered yet. So that payment now creates so much overhead because now you have to defer revenue and then you have to recognize revenue and then, well, the GL 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. **Drew Rogers** (29:53) Who are you doing this with? **Kareem Khattab** (29:54) Yeah, Omar, who's our head of engineering, happens to be 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 Kitchen. 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 some really smart contractors and project based folks. Yeah, it's been us for four years. It **Drew Rogers** (30:28) blows me away that essentially three guys. have been able to build this. A lot of people often will ask, and I'm sure you get this a lot, it's sort of like a badge of honor, how many people you work with. A lot of people in my family are like, hey, how's the business going? How many people you work with now? And it's like, five, ten? And they're like, **Kareem Khattab** (30:47) well, you must not be doing that well. **Drew Rogers** (30:49) 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. But that's not really accurate anymore. Like what you guys have built with three people is absolutely remarkable to me. Yeah. Absolutely remarkable. **Kareem Khattab** (31:06) 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 **Drew Rogers** (31:24) astronomical rounds. What was the fact that you shared yesterday? That was crazy. **Kareem Khattab** (31:29) Yeah, so in the last 12 months, our customers have raised over a billion 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 marketplaces using stablecoins. Shout out Couryard. **Drew Rogers** (31:49) You guys work with CoinFlow? **Kareem Khattab** (31:51) We'll know, but we serve a lot of the partners that CoinFlow supports, and we see the volumes, which is really cool. **Drew Rogers** (31:58) Okay, so we keep skipping ahead. Okay, so define, you know, when you were building this out, you realized, 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 we know that this is a huge problem. You've got to get it right. 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 to create the growth and building with them like yeah bring us into those first principles of where you started **Kareem Khattab** (32:45) What we focused on when we first raised our funding round was digital assets, stablecoins, crypto companies, because they were very unique to companies like WeWork and CloudKitchens 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 with brand new technology for very modern, fast-growing businesses, And another thing that I really appreciate about these customers were because they're already on the frontier of tech and they're building something that there was so much uncertainty around. When we tell them, hey, do you want AI to automate your bookkeeping? They're like, yeah, that sounds like something we would want to do because they're already building in stablecoins. They might be shut down the next day. Who knows? It was very uncertain. People didn't have The time or the bandwidth to worry about their books, but they also understood that we had to be... It was very core to their business that they knew what was going on. **Drew Rogers** (33:51) Absolutely. In these customers, you specifically, it looks like, have picked infrastructure companies. Talk a little bit about the customer base you've built and maybe the complexity of those types of companies. **Kareem Khattab** (34:05) 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 us serving accounting firms, which again, serve many businesses. They're the most complex. We want to 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, uh, on Tondra, you guys should check them out. It's very simple because those end consumers, which are other businesses for like a Braille, a rain, a 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 installation 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 They're much more simpler than, say, a Braille that might have 300 accounts that they have to manage between multiple blockchains and on and off **Drew Rogers** (35:22) ramps. If you're open to it, I'd love to just break down, pick one of these customers or case studies and walk us through the problem, solution, and outcome. What were they going through? What did you do? How did Entendre fit in? **Kareem Khattab** (35:37) Yeah, so I always like using... We love all these companies, by the way, like a lot **Drew Rogers** (35:41) of friends of the show. So you can't really pick a loser here. **Kareem Khattab** (35:44) Yeah, let's just use Polygon Labs as a very quick example. They have 32 legal entities, and we're probably the only... Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, BVNK, Dani Vilardell, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live. **Kareem Khattab** (36:12) 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. **Drew Rogers** (36:25) Not just stablecoins, all tokens. Yeah, **Kareem Khattab** (36:27) exactly. Unrealize and realize gain losses. And hey, if we can solve that, yeah. You know, your stablecoin workflows are going to 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 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 Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Kareem Khattab. Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Kareem Khattab. **Drew Rogers** (37:12) The GL, you're saying? **Kareem Khattab** (37:14) Yeah, exactly. Going back to the GL discussion, I'm by no means going to go to a multi-billion dollar organization and tell them, hey, you should just stop using NetSuite, no matter what our personal opinion of it is. They also know that it's not great, but let's just make it painless. 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'm **Drew Rogers** (37:45) not. Who's doing that? **Kareem Khattab** (37:47) Yeah, so we just recently announced a partnership with Dual Entry and they're like an AI native ERP. They raised, you know, like $90 million. Dual **Drew Rogers** (37:56) Entry? **Kareem Khattab** (37:57) Yeah, but again, they're 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 because we have mutual customers, one of them, 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 stablecoins. **Drew Rogers** (38:28) Yeah, so interesting. Bring us into the news now. So what happened? Where are you at? What are you excited about? I'm just learning about this, but yeah, tell us about this news and how this came to **Kareem Khattab** (38:39) be. It's funny to talk about the future as if people are going to be listening to this. I can talk as if it happened. 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. We play a pivotal role in that and as we push the needle on stablecoin adoption, as we Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Kareem Khattab** (39:28) One in the same 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 going to 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? 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 going to happen sooner than we think. **Drew Rogers** (40:07) Yeah. MoonPay is such an incredible organization. Their history is rich. Their business lines are deep and increasingly wide. What makes them a good acquirer here? What makes you excited to go work with them on this? **Kareem Khattab** (40:21) Well, I think their business is really exciting, especially with Iron, with Sodot, with Dflow, MoonPay Commerce. There's so much synergy. And what I'm excited about, again, is the fact that they saw how important Entendre was as 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 start making decisions quickly. **Drew Rogers** (41:08) Yeah, so you mentioned a handful of these entities or partners within MoonPay that are probably amazing potential customers for Entendre. As a part of this deal, is it going to work where Entendre will be servicing MoonPay internally as a part of MoonPay? All of the benefits of Ontondra will kind of be in-house to them, but will it still exist independently and be able to kind of go out to market on its own? Yeah, so **Kareem Khattab** (41:33) Ontondra will remain an independent brand 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 models and how quickly things 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 going to make us like, you know, put us in the real shot to be the winner here. **Drew Rogers** (42:15) It's amazing. What now? So this news is public. Congrats, by the way. I mean, that's what an amazing moment. What are you going to do now? What's the next step? **Kareem Khattab** (42:25) Yeah, so I think we're going to continue to push the needle for our customers. We're going to continue to automate more and more of their financial workflows. We're going to double down on our AI capabilities, and then we're going to double down on integrating more into the ecosystem within MoonPay. To your point, yes, like MoonPay will be adopting Ontandra internally. That's something that the team is excited about. And more and more enterprises you're going to see in the near future partner with Ontandra to handle their stablecoin accounting and then in the you 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 stablecoin era of finance **Drew Rogers** (43:16) yeah This is your first exit as a founder. **Kareem Khattab** (43:19) First startup, first exit, first time raising venture **Drew Rogers** (43:22) capital. Amazing. What does it feel like compared to, I 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 process of **Kareem Khattab** (43:40) it? 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. I'm really excited for even just industrial AI. I always joke, what's next after vertical SaaS for me? Longer term, I would say I'd love to just start applying AI to things like mining and I think there's just a lot of opportunity and I think if you're a founder today, just know that 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 Canton at the right problem. **Drew Rogers** (44:28) What do you think was the main thing that you did right to make this company worth? Like what were those things that you think maybe specifically for Entendre but also like guidance to other people building things that ultimately like what are we doing here? We're trying to build things that are valuable. So what did that look like for you and what's your advice to others who might be wanting to build something? **Kareem Khattab** (44:50) Yeah, I would say experience is important. 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 worth solving, you should use and tap into your experience. And then I think building Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, BVNK, Dani Vilardell, Incline, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live. **Drew Rogers** (45:23) 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 your thoughts be to them? **Kareem Khattab** (45:39) I think for me, you need to get to that when we were talking about levels, right? You just need to get to level three as fast as possible because the alternative is actually very bleak, I would say. And you mentioned the tech layoffs and things like that. Coinbase just announced a pretty big round. 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 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 these 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. **Drew Rogers** (46:44) What would you go build or what do you see as someone who's operated in the market? Maybe specifically to digital asset tokenization, stablecoin. You've been, I think, done a really, really good job of not focusing where like, like you built on Tondra, not as another payments thing with stablecoins, but as a What are some of these areas that you think might be around the corner today that people could go build and solve for? **Kareem Khattab** (47:25) 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, 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 an overhaul because stablecoins are coming, right? The way that you invoice and the way that you manage your revenue accounting, I think will be a big one. Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live. **Kareem Khattab** (48:10) 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 revenue and income and all of that for a business in construction or real estate or insurance is very different from say subscription, SaaS, e-commerce and I think latter ones like subscription-based and SaaS-based models are already very saturated. So I would just say go and explore how very archaically run companies are doing things and see how stablecoins and crypto and blockchains can apply. **Drew Rogers** (48:51) Yeah. Do you see something like Entendre being a almost like, I think even though this acquisition is in place, like the idea of Entendre and the potential for it is so massive and still so early and untapped, like this is not the end of Entendre by any means, it sounds like. And 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. Have you thought about stuff like that? **Kareem Khattab** (49:32) 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 customers. Systems integration, ISVs. All of that needs to just be completely stripped away. And once that happens, we can pinpoint exactly the friction to onboard these businesses much easier. Because again, there's no incentives other than getting you up to speed as fast as possible. So the age of the consultant, implementer type, a boutique firm that charges you millions of dollars on top of already millions of dollars of contracts for your accounting stack. To kind of have it all work together, that's going to go away. And just like stablecoins are deflationary for consumers and businesses, Ontandra is deflationary for our consumer and businesses that we partner with. **Drew Rogers** (50:29) Yeah. Last question here, sort of framing and helping people understand where Ontandra fits. So 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, TaxBits. You have this sort of software, Cryptio as well. You have these really interesting software companies and companies taking that approach. How do you compare or contrast what they're doing to what Entendre's doing? Because it seems similar but different to me. **Kareem Khattab** (51:10) A lot of the names that you mentioned were kind of existed before Entendre for many years, right? 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. Kind of like that 2017 to 2021 time period. It's just like how fast can you really AI-ify your product and how you operate, right? Traditionally, you needed a $10 million P&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 multi-year 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 an API call to the LLM. You hoped 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 months. We were there for the big, you know, vector DB 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 and we like increased revenue by 10x, blew the cap off on our growth. And that was kind of the inflection point. And that happened at the beginning of 2025. 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 going to win and AI-first, AI-pilled, AI-native teams are going to be outpaced and outcompete a lot of these legacy guys. **Drew Rogers** (53:13) Amazing, 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 into the story and the current moment. What would be the The invitation into this, like how can people get involved? What kind of companies specifically right now are you trying to talk with most? What is the final invitation to the market or the random weirdos on X who might be watching this still? **Kareem Khattab** (53:46) Yeah look if you're uh 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 pages in under construction but by the time this gets yeah who are you **Drew Rogers** (54:00) hiring right now **Kareem Khattab** (54:01) we're hiring a lot of uh ai engineering We're going to 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 want to create a self-learning loop and make all of our operations pretty efficient. And then obviously 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. **Drew Rogers** (54:38) So exciting, man. Kareem, thanks for the time. **Kareem Khattab** (54:40) Thank you for having me. It's fun.