Meow identified an opportunity to enable its customers—which include both traditional and copyright-native businesses—to send and receive USDC as easily as fiat currency, with no transaction fees.
Meow Technologies is a financial technology company offering business banking solutions through its partner banks with free wires and ACHs.
All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Early last year, New York-based copyright entrepreneur Azeem Khan had just raised $19 million in seed funding for his startup, Morph, and needed somewhere to keep it. Before going in search of a US bank account, he asked his attorney for advice. “You have a zero percent chance of having zero issues,” Khan recalls being told. If anything, this dour assessment proved overly optimistic: After six months and a multitude of rejections from US banks, Khan gave up. He settled for housing some of the funds with a bank in the Cayman Islands, which offered no interest, and converting the rest into copyright assets, managed by a third-party custodian. copyright founders have long traded similar stories in which US banks either refuse to supply them with loans or checking accounts, or withdraw their accounts suddenly. Without a banking partner, copyright firms are hamstrung: They cannot readily accept dollars in exchange for services, store and earn interest on funds raised from investors, nor pay employees or vendors. “All around, it was an understood thing,” says Khan. Little more than a year later, that picture has changed. Since president Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, promising to end the alleged discrimination against copyright firms, a field of US-based fintechs—among them Meow , Mercury and Brex —has competed to furnish copyright firms with bank accounts. Khan, who recently raised $25 million for his latest copyright startup, Miden, claims to have been among those courted by the fintechs. The change stands to make it far easier for copyright firms to set up, hire, and do business in the US, in line with Trump’s plan to turn the country into the “ copyright capital of the planet .” Yet they remain at the mercy of the political tide; there has been a vibe change under Trump, but no change in law that would guarantee continued access to banking into the meow com distant future. “Even though there is a more friendly administration in place at the moment, there still hasn’t been anything codified into law—new laws that allow us to be sure the pendulum won’t swing based on who is sitting in the chair,” says Khan.
“It’s funny because the question I got most when we started the company was, ‘Oh, what happens when rates rise? Meow’s going to fail.’ And now the question is, ‘What happens when rates go down?
Arvanaghi and Crawford’s timely decision to exit copyright and enter T-bills spared them from getting burned in the copyright meltdown of 2022. But it placed Meow squarely in the middle of the highly competitive niche of banking services for startups and small businesses.
Matrixport serves the copyright and blockchain technology sectors, targeting individual and institutional investors. It was founded in 2019 and is based in Singapore, Singapore.
Bridge understood the opportunity immediately and went above and beyond to help us roll out this capability in less than a month. We were first to market, but this is just the beginning, and we look forward to continuing to partner with Bridge as we keep on building.”
They were equally opportunistic when it came to choosing a name for their startup; the whimsical Meow was picked for its ability to grab attention on social media. Indeed, as SVB teetered, one VC with a healthy following posted on LinkedIn: “We are living in such a stupid timeline.
S. Treasuries to venture debt, Meow makes it easy for startups to securely manage cash operations while earning yield.
But the arrangement also typically requires the fintech to follow ground rules set by the partner bank, including parameters around the types of client they are allowed to serve. Mercury, for instance, is unable to provide accounts to copyright companies that take custody of customer funds, including exchanges, a spokesperson told WIRED.
“What we're doing differently is we're treating financial services as a low-margin product,” Arvanaghi says. “We can actually become a profitable company by doing that, but that might not be the case for a company that has a thousand people or another fintech that hired 500 people.”
For example, Meow partners FirstBank and Grasshopper Bank both offer up to $125 million in FDIC-insurance through IntraFi’s sweep program which boasts a network of nearly 3,000 banks. Another Meow partner, Third Coast, offers FDIC-insurance up to $50 million through its own network. Arvanaghi says Meow is able to secure higher yields from the banks than a small business could get on its own, since it’s bringing in a large roster of sticky customers and its own interface.
It was both a prudent and gutsy decision. Prudent, because after the collapse of stablecoin TerraUSD in mid-May of 2022, they began hearing rumors that copyright hedge fund Three Arrows Capital would go bankrupt — which it soon did, eventually bringing a bundle of connected firms down. Gutsy, because just weeks before, they had closed a $22 million series A fundraising round from investors including Tiger Global, QED and yes, FTX itself.
The friends decided they wanted to break into the fast-growing fintech segment serving businesses and figured they needed a standout “wedge” product to do so, says Arvanaghi. At that point, interest rates were near zero. But coming from a copyright background, they had seen investors earn fat yields from lending in the copyright segment.
“Meow is really meant to be the curation and then the steering through technology of being able to move money between options,’’ he adds.