$110M Raised to Scale the Enterprise Finance Platform Burger King and H&M Use

Dulip, big day for Jeeves. Thanks for joining us on the show today. How's it going? For having me on. Looking forward to this. Exciting. Tell us tell us what's going on today across across the world. We got Bloomberg Press. We got some big news.

Yeah. So we just announced our 110,000,000 equity round. This round is being led by CoinFund. And just to give people an idea what we do, so we provide a stable coin native financial operating system for enterprises. So what that means is if you're a company like Burger King or Lululemon or H and M and you operate in multiple countries, today, you need to have cards for your employees from different providers, and then you need payments from different providers.

And so we combine all of that into one one box and give that to you. So we have card operations in 35 countries. So we just announced 10 new countries today. So if you need cards for your employees in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, US, we can do all of that together. And then we do payments to about a 190 countries as well directly on jeep. So we abstract all of the stablecoin, fiat, etcetera, etcetera, and sell it to you directly as one platform.

And so this is our first round that we're bringing in stablecoin slash crypto investors. So Coinfund, Para Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute, etcetera. So very exciting for us from that perspective. We used to be... I guess not used to be. We are still obviously backed by Andre's. But this is our first that's, you know, fully in the stablecoin crypto space.

How would you describe that that kind of evolution? And I was kinda talking with Drew earlier in the show. We've, you know, we've covered Rain and these companies that, hey. This this was their lane. They started completely stablecoin on chain. Like, this was... This is kinda who they are, and we haven't covered too many companies that I I wouldn't say you've gone through a full digital transformation, but it is that, you know, is that transformation of, okay. We're building a payments company.

This is now core infrastructure. Like, what was that journey like as it become more and more ingrained in your business to the point now where,

you know, when you're going and doing a raise, it makes sense to bring these these investors on the cap table. Yeah. So so the thesis for us has always been we wanna build the first global business bank for enterprises. So think of it as a Revolut for enterprises. And if you think about Stablecoin and b two b, usually Stablecoin b two b focuses on self serve. So it's 5% ecommerce companies, digital nomads. We help the PSP or the fintech move money. But very few go to an enterprise like BMW and say, hey.

Do you need to make a payment to Google? Today, you use traditional rails. Why not use Stablecoin for that? Then the reason is because you have to win their trust first. It's a true enterprise sale, and Stablecoin is almost like one small part of that entire ecosystem. And so what we have built before Stablecoin was we built the stack where they trust us with their banking. And then what changed is after the passage of the Genius Act, it's now kosher for us to add Stablecoin to it. That's really what changed.

It's not that we didn't have the stack before. We have our own ledger. We have three principal memberships for card issuing. Most companies don't have that. We can do payments a 190. We always had that. It's just now the ledger is stablecoin. And so something that used to take one to two hours takes one... Sorry. One to two days takes one to two hours. And so I think there are pioneers in the space like Rain and, you know, we know them. We work with them, etcetera. We we come at this from a different angle.

So today, our product is not an API that you can plug into like RAIN. It's more of the finished product. So think of it more like a American Express or like a Brex. We sell you the end product itself that your employees can use. And so we combine both the fiat and stablecoin, and our selling point to Burger King is you don't need to have six corporate card providers and seven payment, you know, providers. You can combine that all into one. You get one login.

You get this thing we call a god view, and you can see it across the entire company that we offer again.

That's hilarious. Yeah. So it sounds like the way you would... You kind of... I I liked how you were comparing and contrasting a little bit to some of these more, like, maybe modular type of stacks is for these larger enterprises? Is it is it mostly the treasury teams, finance teams who are using this and, you know, maybe they're not actually the most technical group or No. Maybe separate from, like, the developer engineering group and they actually just want something ready to go?

It's it's it's a great question, and and it's spot on. I mean, they... We sell primarily to kind of the treasurer, the controller,

and they don't care about Stablecoin. Stablecoin is is a commodity. They care if I send this payment, is it gonna show up? If it doesn't, I'm gonna get fired. And if you tell me it's gonna show up, can I trust them? That's what they care about. Right? So they're not trying to optimize for five bps or 10 bps here. They're trying to say, hey. If this makes my operation more efficient, I'm actually happy to pay for this because, you know, that has more value than saving a few bps here or there.

So it's a very different ICP, very different audience from, you know, small businesses that use table coin. But it's exactly like you said, we don't sell into the tech team. We sell directly into the CFO suite. So our focus is the back end for the CFO to run their their company. So the controller, the treasurer, the tech one, that's what we sell into.

Where do you educate this ICP? Because I think this is something, you know, we see CBOs going on, and then you obviously have the breakpoints in Korean blockchain weeks of the world. Like, where are the events that you go to meet CFOs and you go to meet your and you go to, like, see them face to face to actually, like, deeply understand how how they're moving money?

Yeah. You gotta make a lot of trips to Brazil and Argentina and Mexico because that... That's where you find find them. I mean, they they... That... You gotta go find them where they are. Right? And so a lot of times, we are not selling Stablecoin. I mean, in fact, we call it Jeeves Instant Pay. And it's not like we're hiding Stablecoin. It's just abstract. And if they ask us, we tell them it's USDC, USDT. Here's how it works. But our selling point isn't, hey. Here's Stablecoin.

And I think the future of Stablecoin adoption is more the outcome. Like, what is it that I'm getting from this, and then can I trust you? And if Stablecoin's there, that's great. It's almost like if you went back in time, you know, fifteen years ago, you wouldn't say, hey. Use us to send ACH payments. You just say, use us to make a payment. It just so happens that that's on ACH or that's on Fedwire. That's just a rail. Right? And that's how we kind of pitch it. We just use us to do stablecoin. Sorry.

Use us to do your payments, and the payments just so happen to be on stablecoin. But to answer your question, you kinda have to do a full enterprise sales cycle. So you go talk to them. You meet them. It's three, four months, which is why this is one of the hardest segments for actual stablecoin adoption because it's not the fast mover. It's not the crypto, you know, native company that's like, yeah. I get it. I totally get it. Like, I'm all in. It's Yeah. The opposite of that. Right? It's construction companies.

It's com... Companies that work in airlines. Like, yes, stablecoin, but, like, really, you know, can I trust you? That's the core part of this whole equation.

When you talk about this god view, like, how many... Like, bring us into, like, how many entities are some of these people actually managing? Like, how complex does this start to get? I remember I was I was watching a recap of, you ever seen the series Landman? And they were talking about how many... You know, he's like, yeah. We're this... We're some... We're siloed into, you know, 20 entities. And, like, I... I've just had this visual in my head of just, like, all these wires getting intermingled in the pay...

These payments and treasury upper... Operations being so much more complex, and I think we really give them credit for. Yeah. And when I think about how that has been formed, you know, the product you're building, there's so many nuances for all these different business lines that So where do start? Yeah. It's it's a great question. We

usually have customers that use us in more than one country. That... That's kind of the sweet spot. And so we have companies that use us in nine countries. So if you think about just their CFO, right, what are we solving? I used to run a company before Jesus, my second company. We had operations in two countries, The US and outside The US. At the end of the month, when I as the COO and founder would be like, hey. How much did we spend last month? Or, hey. Like, how much cash did we actually use or have left?

I would get that answer thirty days after the month closed. There's simply no way to get a real time view across multiple countries and multiple different providers because all of the data sits in different silos. And so what we provide for the first time is if you have Jeeves and you're using us in 35 countries for your employees, you can log in today and see a real time view of what the spend is across the 30 countries. That's very hard to do unless you own the data stack yourselves.

And that's the biggest thing that we have, which is we have a lot of this infrastructure directly on us. We are principal members. We're directly issuing. In Brazil, we're gonna be a deposit taking bank at the end of this year. I mean, that's a pretty high bar to kind of get to, but we go very, very deep on the regulatory and license stack.

And that's very different from, let me plug into x y z and spin up a neobank because the people that we sell to, which are enterprises, they need that depth, others they're not gonna buy from. I I I would say we're very unique in that sense because Stablecoin is powering this growth, but the core product is solving a very hard problem to solve, which is if you operate across more than one country, how do you get visibility on your finances?

Yep. We're seeing a ton of that, like, what you're talking talking about. We're seeing many, many other companies take take that approach where they're like, you know, I'm I'm... Maybe I won't get the principal membership, or I'm going to just plug in to these other things and maybe focus on a go to market effort that is selling to these these types of firms, but maybe not owning a lot of the stack yourself. How do you...

When you were thinking early on about the strategy of Jeeves and and where you are now, what was really crucial to you? Did you kind of start knowing that you wanted to own as much of this as possible, or did you kind of, like, just learn that that's how you

So We were talking to David Marcus at Lightspark about this a lot, just like where the true focus of the business should be. I I... It's a really, really good question. I I think part of the reason we built Jeeves the way we did is, candidly, because I don't have a fintech or banking background. This is my first fintech company. And so when you come in with, like, an outsider perspective, kinda you look at things a little more from first principles in the sense that you don't know what's not possible.

Good or bad, you don't know what's not possible. And so, usually, what a fintech does that operates in more than one country is they go very deep in country one. Three years later, they're like, let's go to country two. Then it's country three, and each one they're building stack by stack. What we have that's very different is the entire stack is modular. So what does that mean? So let's say you're doing card issuing, which is a core business line for us. I see card issuing as four components.

You have the top of the funnel, k by b customer acquisition. You have the processor. You have the program manager for regulation and compliance, and then you have the issuing BIN, the bank identification number from Visa or Mastercard that gives you the license to issue the card in the country. What we do that's very unique for Jeeves is the first three sit on our own stack. That's our core IP. So we control the ledger. When you swipe the card, we say yes or no.

When you send the payments, we're the ones that decide, like, which rail that it goes on. And so when we go from Mexico to Colombia, the only thing we need to switch is number four, which is the bin. Tomorrow, if we launch Indonesia, the only thing we would need to switch is number four, which is bin. That's the difference in the architecture stack that we have. But I would be lying if I said this was some, you know, grand scheme plan from the beginning. It was more, okay. Can we try to build this this way?

Let's try it. Let's see what's happening. Let's add layers. So it's kinda like a learn as you go, as opposed to, like, this, you know, grand vision that I woke up one day, primarily because I don't have a fintech or banking background before Jeeves. And so I looked at this more from a engineering slash architecture problem versus banking reals, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Totally. What what has been the hardest part of that stack so far? Like, going through and and being able to claim those few those few items. Like, what was the So most difficult

Yeah. Piece of that? The hardest thing we do, which people don't realize, is issuing statements. Statement issuing is the hardest part because that means your ledger has to be perfect. We don't go to provider a and say, hey. Give us a statement, and we give it to the customer. The statement that they get at the end of the month, line by line, we generate that. That means your FX has to be perfect. That means your currency Internet has to be perfect. Because the customer is gonna tell you one of those things are off.

That took us about eighteen months eighteen months to get right. But once you have that right, that's the core building block because that's the ledger. When you have that right, then you can add Stablecoin. The Stablecoin is just another currency. And now your ledger is already built in the stack where Stablecoin just makes it much faster. So by far, the hardest thing was was issuing your own statements. And we do this, by the way, across 25 countries. Right?

It's it's very different if it's in one country with one currency That you can do. But if you have to do this across multiple geographies with companies that have multiple entities, you need to have a pretty strong data stack, and it's a little bit of trial and error. I mean, you do it, you're closed, and you figure out, like, what's that one edge case that you didn't think about. You add that back in. So that's, to me, the crux of, like, our core IP. It's the statement cycle that we own.

It's this ledger that we own. That's what took us about eighteen months pre Stablecoin to get right, and then Stablecoin accelerated that growth.

I wanna unpack, like, this. I love what you said about earlier, the... We're selling the future outcome. And let's just assume that in the next, you know, three to five years, like, Jeeves or a company like Jeeves, like, the... It's the gold standard. Right? This is what the CFO or the treasury manager that's coming out of college. Like, they're just... They're using these. Moving money this fast is now bare minimum. What are the future outcomes then then you have to sell?

What are they looking forward to next now that they can get their money faster than ever before?

So I I believe, and I think this is coming faster than we really think. It... It's inevitable that we're going to have programmable money used by agents. Like, you can already start seeing the outlines of this, and I think this is why stable... Where where stablecoin sits is so unique because if you think about programmable money, you have two components. You have the agent that needs to be able to access something without a human in the loop.

So, you know, MCP, Instinct, Muse, whatever you wanna call it, but, like, basically, some way for your agent to spin up and, like, go figure something out. And then the second part is you need to be able to break money into as small of its components as possible. And that's exactly what Stablecoin is useful for. So when you look at a country like Brazil, Brazil has instant payments with picks. That's 85% adoption pushed by central government.

If there is an outcome where that now moves on to a BRL backed by Stablecoin, it becomes at the forefront of what you'd call, like, an agentic economy or programmable money because you have all of the components. You have money that's fully digitized. That's PICS. You can now move that onto Stablecoin that's backed by the BRL, and then you have agents that can access that stable client.

So I see the next stage, which actually I don't think is gonna be that far away, is how do we get the companies that we work with and our product ready for this programmable money future that's coming. I do think the adoption is gonna be first probably, you know, in US, Europe, etcetera, but I think it's inevitable that it comes internationally very shortly. And if you look at the corridors that use table coin, the two biggest ones are LatAm and Southeast Asia.

And so we are perfectly positioned with the coverage we have in LatAm to be able to provide this for our end end customers.

I'd imagine the the report that you... The statement that you generate, the amount of information that is within that is... I mean, we we all know that feeling even on a personal level of, like, oh, crap. My credit card is Yeah. Honey, what have you been spending on? I'm looking at this thing. It's so... It's like, well, how did this happen? You know? And to actually be able to engage and get insights from this pretty dynamic...

I I can't even imagine the the the complexity of what that looks like at an enterprise level or, a multinational level. I can imagine... I love your thoughts on this. Like, when we start thinking about the world of bringing more of an agentic experience into the treasury flow or into the financial flow, like, the types of... The relationship between, like, manual work that would be within that statement versus, like, what an agent could help you with.

Seems like that person that you're selling to is in a perfect position to start experiencing the benefits of something like that. I think that's the question we we often are asking a lot of these founders and builders is like, where do you start? Who has the pain? How do you actually embed Yeah. But, like Well that person you're already in touch with seems like such a great

place. I... For for us, that's one of our biggest assets, which is we have the trust of CFOs. I mean, people have been trying to get enterprises to use Stablecoin for years. It's not that we magically, like, figure that out. The biggest starting point is we already have access to the companies that need it, but the main thing is they trust us. And so now it's easier to kind of add that Stablecoin.

I think the flip side, which is also interesting just to your question or thought around the agents, is internationally, the cost of labor is also lower. So you do compete with this box of, like, yes, we can get an agent to do it, but I already have a team of three people doing it, and they're doing it well enough. And so part of the the role that we play in other companies like us is selling what that looks like in the future. Yes.

You can do it today, but is that same team gonna be able to handle when your business 10 x, when you add six more countries? Right? That's what we can provide for you with a combination of this agentic future with stablecoin.

So interesting. How... And how much of this is... I was, you know, I was just watching a episode of YouTube video this morning. It was sponsored by Rocket Money, and they, you know, they've been really pushing the know your subscriptions and manage your finances better. And they were talking about they just had their their agent launch, where it's like, now you can also go and understand your finances kinda like what you were talking about, Drew.

How much will we talk about this agent economy is agents moving the money and using agents to understand how the money is already moving.

Yeah. So so the moving money, I think, is actually... It... It's it's more structural. Like like... Because even if you think about it now, right, how do you move money? You have cards, you have payments, and then part of what hasn't been figured out is the cost for money movement at a certain size is still kind of fixed. So if you're moving 1¢ or you're moving $1, there's a minimum cost you need to pay to move money, and you can subsidize it. You know, Facebook and Yeniths. Right? But there's a cost.

There's a cost, and it doesn't drop significantly if the size of what you're moving is changing. So that I do think long term, there's gonna be better services that provide, you know, agentic banking. I think there's a few you guys are probably in touch with that are trying to do that. I think that is not figured out yet. I think the context is incredible. I mean, it's only getting better. Right?

Like, I'm I'm always surprised where how much it starts connecting the context faster than even, you know, I was asking it to do. So I do think that is gonna come really, really fast. If not, we're already past, like, the fifty, sixty, 70%. Like, it's better than a human in a lot of things at the context setting. It's not perfect, and it doesn't have, like, a lot of historical knowledge. But, also, it's... Like, I compare it to, like, you're bringing in an intern or an analyst.

They don't have historical knowledge either. You take ninety days and you train them. That's what you do. When they come in, ninety days, you train them. If you don't train your agent for ninety days, why do you expect a different outcome? But the context setting, I think, is very, very high. I think the first part is still a gap.

I I do think there will be technology that addresses that, but there's almost a fixed cost for money movement, for payments for cards that doesn't drop linearly as the size of the payment or the card usage drops.

Yeah. You've mentioned trust as, like, a a really, really key thing that has taken time to develop that you're proud of that seems like very core to the relationship you have right now with with these customers? Like, when you think about maintaining, deepening, and continuing to grow trust, how do you think about integrating and bringing to life some of these things, which, you know, things... Stablecoins maybe less so, but still, like, in this category of, like Yep.

Newness and and pushing the envelope a little bit. Like, how do you continue as a builder, as a leader to keep that trust intact but also stay innovative? But, like, how how are you approaching delivering these types of products in the right time, in the right way? Yeah.

So this is a great great question and something we spend a lot of time thinking on. So I'll I'll use one example. You have to kind of really meet your audience where they are. So Stablecoin is a is a is a good use case because stablecoin usually has a form of yield. Right? There's yield you can provide, you can give it back to your customer, etcetera. And yield has many variations. Right? You have treasury, then you have, you know, like, the semi risky, then it's, like, the super risky. Right?

And and what people usually do is they say, hey. You pick. Right? Here are the options. Here's what you can pick, blah blah blah. That makes an assumption that the person on the other side, which is your customer, has the sophistication to pick. And I think this is a great example of we could do something similar to that, and that's probably better for us as a business. But what happens if they pick something risky and they don't understand exactly what it is? That reflects really bad on us as a business.

One of them doesn't work. That will, you know, have a outsized effect on the trust that we have with these companies. And so this is to me an example of you kind of have to meet your customer, your ICP where they are, even if it's not the best decision from a revenue perspective for your company. And so in this example, when we are offering yield, it's pretty safe yield. It's gonna be 3%. We'll have one option that's maybe 6%, but that's it.

And if you want more than that, yes, it's in the market, but I don't think it helps us on the trust side because if even one of them goes wrong, that impact of that that blast radius is significant. So you have to meet them where they are. You have to make that choice of, like, I'm gonna trade company revenue for the trust because if one of this trust breaks, that's much more impactful than us earning $8,000,000 or whatever the number is. Yeah.

Well said. Talib, I think we have to transfer... We have to get ready to switch here to our to our next guest. But I guess if you were to speak to maybe yourself before, you know, when you were going to start Jeeves or kind of that young founder that's just getting started, what's one piece of advice that you that you wish you could give them or that you wish somebody gave you?

Yeah. I I think founders need to fall in love with the process of building. I think there's a lot of folks, especially... It's better now, but in the crypto space leans in this direction where they like to do the startup cycle. And and, again, it's good to have an outcome. You want to get an outcome. That's always a great thing. But if you don't love the process of building, you're not going to get to the outcome because it's so exhausting sometimes.

And so you have to enjoy, like, what is it that you're building, the curiosity of that, the, you know, times when, like, we... Like, we're announcing this round. Everyone's gonna see the number, but they don't see the last two years when we had to make this really hard decision of, like, do we do stablecoin? I don't have the information. I still have 50% information. I have to make that call. Is it right call? Looks like it now, but, you know, last year, I wouldn't be able to tell you.

You You have to enjoy that process. You have to have to fall in love with the process of building, or it's just really hard to last the marathon sprint to build a startup because it is exhausting. It is grueling. It takes everything out of you. And if you don't enjoy the process, it... It's hard. And so that's that's the one thing that I would say, like, like, the founders that make it... They they do it because they have to. They do it because they enjoy that process itself, independent of the outcome.

And the flip side is when you actually enjoy the process, it's actually much more likely you'll get the outcome because you're putting everything you have into it. So that's kind of my advice. You know, hopefully, it's it's valuable.

It's awesome. Said. Dulip, thanks for the time. I'm looking here just, like, before we go on your careers page. You guys are hiring, like, mad all over the world. Any any roles you wanna call out? Go go hit that up. Any any stablecoin

partnerships, go to market sales, we're hiring product managers, we're hiring engineering, we're hiring pretty much any role we're hiring, but this is a big, big push for us, which is we are newer to the space. We wanna learn from people that have that experience. So please send me a note. It's delete, dileep@trygus.com. I'll I'll route it to the right channel, but just send me a note directly if this is interesting.

We are building at the absolute cutting edge of, you know, enterprise money movement, Stablecoin AI, and I don't think a lot of companies have the footprint we have. We've been a little bit under the radar in the Stablecoin space that's gonna change now, but I think it's a very unique opportunity to serve enterprises that a lot of companies don't have access to. Incredible. 107,000,000

equity round. Thanks for coming on and, giving giving us some time today. Big day for you guys. Excited to see Congrats again. Where you go from here. Congrats. Appreciate it. K. Bye. Cheers.