Stablecoins, AI Agents, and The Future of Global Banking

Angela Strange speaks with Dileep Thazhmon, founder and CEO of Jeeves, about building a global financial operating system for enterprises across Latin America using stablecoins and AI. The conversation covers the challenges of building localized financial infrastructure across 25 countries, from regulation and payments to underwriting and compliance. They also discuss why stablecoin adoption is accelerating in Latin America, and how AI is helping Jeeves scale billions in payment volume while automating underwriting, customer support, reconciliation, and KYB workflows.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The goal of Jeeves is really to build a global business bank that can function in multiple countries. Stablecoins is a lived experience. It's not something that's a theory. In Argentina, 60% of the population use stablecoins. Our revenue has grown 10x, our volume has grown 8x. This just wouldn't be possible without it. Money is going to become programmable, and hopefully, we're at that nexus of all of this happening.

• 0:21Angela Strange?

  Often, when companies start in financial services, just because there's so much product to build, the tendency is to start with the smaller guys, grow with them, and then eventually earn the credibility to get with the bigger guys. You took the opposite approach. How did you become relevant to relatively large companies really quickly in the journey?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Our underwriting team today is four people, and that team is doing $2 billion, $3 billion in TPB. That just wouldn't have been possible two and a half years ago. You need 15 people just to get that off the ground. That's what's changed. If you are not AI-pilled, you're not going to make it.

• 0:53Erik Torenberg?

  Most financial infrastructure is still fragmented country by country. Different banks, payment rails, currencies, and compliance systems make it difficult for global businesses to operate efficiently, especially across emerging markets. Jeeves is trying to rebuild that stack using stablecoins and AI. What started as a corporate card company in Latin America has evolved into a broader financial operating system spanning payments, treasury, and expense management across 25 countries. A16Z's Angela Strange speaks with Jeeves founder and CEO, Dileep Tasman, about stablecoins, AI, and building global financial infrastructure.

• 1:34Angela Strange?

  Dileep, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. I'm super excited.

• 1:37Angela Strange?

  Before we dive into Jeeves, I don't think a lot of listeners know your backstory, which is pretty interesting. You grew up internationally, you've got a technical background, you started another company and sold it for over $100 million before this.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Long time ago.

• 1:50Angela Strange?

  Yeah, so tell us about you and how that led you to start Jeeves.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I was actually born in Nigeria. So I grew up in three or four different continents, actually. So we moved from Nigeria to Doha, Qatar. So that's where I spent most of my childhood. And this was when Doha was like a one-camel town. I mean, it's funny looking at the airport now, which is massive, and it used to be an airport, like two stalls and plane A or plane B, and you get on one of them, and that was the airport. So it was very small. And then we moved to Florida outside of Orlando, probably about 25 years ago. And so what I've kind of noticed is the company that I'm working on now, Jeeves, is also a global company. So it's almost like a manifestation of my childhood and the fact that I grew up in all of these different places. I then went to school for engineering. So I have actually two engineering degrees, which now I feel a lot more unleashed with all of the stuff with AI because I can start building.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  But the funny story is my master's thesis was actually on using genetic algorithms to mimic money markets. And that was basically LLMs, which was basically you'd have a end goal and it would come up with test cases, rank them. And it's just wild. This was in 2006 and it's amazing seeing that full circle 20 years later with everything that's happening with AI. After that, I started a company. I was in the marketing automation space and right before that I was at Stanford GSP. And that company was Spire Inbox, which we sold for about 106 million. And then I started Jeeves. So basically at this point, if I don't start a company, I'm unemployable. So, but yeah, it's been a great experience, learning a lot of different things. I think what I love about Jeeves most is it's just such a steep learning curve.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  One day you're doing banking in Brazil, next day you have to be an expert on stablecoin. And if you don't like the learning curve, it can be so exhausting. But if you like it, it's very exciting. And I, that's the biggest thing that I find interesting about the day to day.

• 3:33Angela Strange?

  Amazing. And so we're gonna, maybe we're gonna talk through the backstory, but just to ground us, we're, you're five years into the company. What is Jeeves today?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So Jeeves is a stablecoin native financial operating system for global enterprises. We have two core products. The first one is expense management. So we sell corporate cards that we offer to our companies and we can do that in 25 countries. Our core markets are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico. And then our second product is on the payment side. So we do full local payments and international payments. Today, our international payments, more than 50, 60% settles on, directly on stablecoin. And that's been powering a lot of the growth that we've seen in the last year.

• 4:08Angela Strange?

  Amazing. All right. So I think one of the, one of the most interesting ways to understand Jeeves is through your moats.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:14Angela Strange?

  And now they're moats. I would say they were massive challenges to building the company and getting scale. And now we can classify them in the realm of defensibility.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:22Angela Strange?

  So two big ones, they're of infrastructure and regulation.

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:25Angela Strange?

  So start with infrastructure, which is my personal favorite because it looks like unsexy plumbing.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:31Angela Strange?

  But then the decisions there are really what drive the products you're able to offer, specifically the differentiation. And I think where you started in Latin America, an added challenge is unlike the US, there's no as a service for all of these different pieces. So maybe talk us through like, what did you splice together? What did you build? And then like, how does that enable you to drive everything?

• 4:53Speaker 00

  It's a really good point. So internally, we have the saying which we say difficulty is very defensible. Because it's difficult, it's actually defensible. And we've done a lot of difficult things from day one. And so just to give you an example, our core IP, what we consider our core product, so to speak, is not the front facing product. It's the layer in between. We connect to 50, 60 different partners, different vendors, and we abstract all of that information into the central layer. We call it a CMS. And so just to give you an idea of what it could do. So as an example, we maintain our own ledger in 25 countries. And that is really hard to do because you have to do that across currencies, across FX. We issue statements in 25 countries in less than 24 hours. That took us 18 months to figure out.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  And that's a core skill set because then the ledger sits directly with us. And we sit directly on the card out stream. I think a big difference where we play on the card side is we're full principal members, for instance, with Mastercard. And so when we issue the card, it says issued by Jeeves Mexico or issued by Jeeves Brazil. There's no bank in between. And so that obviously requires a certain level of sophistication to be able to run. And we've kind of learned that over time of how to build that. But we try to go very, very close to the infrastructure stack in all of these countries that we play. And I'll give one more example on the card side because I think this might open up how we think about it. When I think about card issuing, I see it as four components. So you have the top of the funnel, customer acquisition. You have the processor. You have the program manager for regulation and compliance. And then you have the issuing bin from Visa or Mastercard that gives you that license

• 6:21Speaker 00

  to issue the 16 digits. What we do, the first three, that sits on our own stack. Even though we have different partners, if we were going from Mexico to Brazil, we only have to change the bin. If you tomorrow wanted to launch Indonesia, we only have to change the bin. And now with Stablecoin, even the bin doesn't have to change because you get one bin and you carve it up by different countries. So it's a super exciting time to be building. And part of the reason we're seeing this acceleration on Stablecoin is because we did the hard work of building our own infrastructure stack for three years.

• 6:47Angela Strange?

  And so for people who are maybe less in the weeds of infrastructure, like, why would it matter to someone like New Bank that you have a Brazilian bin versus, you know, a US bin?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the value is that the customer experience is very seamless. So one of the things that we sell is if you log into Jeeves in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, it looks the same and you're used to seeing the same cards in the same places. And you can't do that unless you sit directly on the rail. And so when we started, which I think you might remember, we actually were shipping US cards.

• 7:21Angela Strange?

  I do remember, yes.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  We were shipping US cards because we didn't have the setup yet. It takes time. It takes time to get the licenses. It takes time to get the processors, all of those things. Today, in every country we operate in, we have local issuing and local licenses. And then what that gives us is the experience for companies like a Hotmart, for a Burger King, it's seamless. It's seamless in the sense that you don't have to train the team three times for three different logins for three different countries. It looks exactly the same and you can't do that unless you sit on the rail.

• 7:45Angela Strange?

  Yep.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  And then just kind of building on that as well, our acceptance is super high because we are sitting directly with our own bin. In Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, we have our own bin that's just for Jeeves. And then the second part of that is we can also build in much better card controls. Because again, we do the actual authentication. When you swipe it, we say yes or no. We also do some of the fraud detection components, obviously with partners like Sardine. But all of that sits directly with us.

• 8:10Angela Strange?

  Okay, so infrastructure, the next critical but often tedious topic is regulation.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:17Angela Strange?

  So maybe talk us through, we've been at this for sort of five years at this point. I think you've got a lot of your licenses, you've got another roadmap. What have you built there?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, so where we sit, we sell directly to mid-market and enterprise companies. So we do not really sell to the long tail. The reason that I bring that up is it's really hard for us to gain the trust of these companies without the right licenses. So we are a regulated entity in Mexico. We filed for our money movement license in Mexico as well. In Brazil, we're actually filing to be a full deposit-taking bank. So it's a very high bar. For a license, but if we don't have this license, one, again, we don't have the full customer flow. So we can provide some version of the cards, we can provide some version of the payments. But to really be kind of the global business bank, enterprise bank, financial operating system, you need to own accounts as well. And to own accounts, you need these licenses.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  So we have always looked at licenses as core defensible mode, as in the product we want to build cannot be built without licenses. And so the issue with licenses is it takes time. And so part of the way I think about building is how do you get into market quickly?

• 9:19Angela Strange?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And get a lot of market share. And then you just have a team that just every day, we're just building layers and layers of this license. And so that way, the customer experience hopefully is seamless. They see the same thing, but on the backend, the product is a lot better because now the licenses sit directly with us. And then the second part that is really important with licenses and with infrastructure is it helps us to expand the margin. Our margin has expanded from forty percent two years ago to north of eighty percent right now. You cannot do that unless you own the infrastructure and unless you have the regulatory coverage, because then you get the whole lion's share and then you pay it out to partners. So that's the positive side of having all of these things, but it's really hard. It's really hard and you need a team. That's what they're doing and we go country by country.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  And even now, I would say we probably need to get four or five more licenses in the regions we're in to get to the stage that we want to get to.

• 10:07Angela Strange?

  So I want to go to, you mentioned you're a little bit more enterprise.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:11Angela Strange?

  Versus smaller company, where I think often when companies start in financial services, just because there's so much product to build.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:18Angela Strange?

  The tendency is to start with smaller guys.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:20Angela Strange?

  Grow with them and then eventually earn the credibility to go with the bigger guys. You took the opposite approach. And so how did you become relevant to relatively large companies fairly quickly in the journey?

• 10:32Speaker 00

  So it's funny because we started with a little bit of doing everything for everybody. Uh, and then, you know, twenty twenty-three was kind of the year that forced focus. Uh, and we were, we were realizing that we were just not making that much money in terms of revenue from smaller businesses and we needed the same support for them. And we're a very lean company. We have, we have less people today than we did two years ago and our revenue has, you know, grown, grown about ten X. So what I'm trying to get to is we're not built to sustain, you know, 10,000 small businesses. That's just not our model. What we're built for is these real mid-market enterprise companies that we sell one product to, and then we cross-sell six others, and we increase the retention, we increase the gross profit that we have at these companies.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  And so it was a little bit of, we did everything, and then we made this really hard decision in 23 to say, okay, which is the audience that really resonates with the product and what's the product we're looking to build? And at that point, we did have to make the hard call to D Bank, uh, some of the smaller businesses that we had. But I don't think we'd be here today if we didn't make that hard call in 2023. Uh, and that started putting the focus on what are we offering? So before 23, we did not have a payments product. Uh, when you go sell this to enterprise, payments is a huge, huge part of their business. In fact, cards volume is actually much smaller than payments volume. Cause if you look at share of wallet, AP, accounts payable is a much bigger box than corporate card spend. And so we started with cards, we started with these versions of credit products. And so we turned all of that off. We were like, what's our focus?

• 11:59Speaker 00

  It's enterprise, it's mid-markets. What do they need? They need accounts, they need payments. And then how do we make sure that we only sell into that subset? In the sense of, we have requirements where if you're below a certain revenue size, and that goes from somewhere between 10 million reais all the way up to 100 million reais, that those are the two segments we have, we just wouldn't onboard you, we can't onboard you. And, and so that was, it's a hard decision because it also then focuses on companies like Y Combinator, where we came from, and they've been incredibly supportive. And we've had to find ways of like, okay, can we like squeeze that in? Because those are the companies who want to build in, but they tend to be smaller to start.

• 12:32Angela Strange?

  Yeah. So maybe a special YC exception.

• 12:37Angela Strange?

  Maybe just a good way to understand Jesus' product suite is to take company like New Bank, which is Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, you landed with cards.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:47Angela Strange?

  Do you want to just walk through, you land with this, and then where does it go?

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so I, I think what's interesting about our product suite is we are global, uh, but we are fully localized. So what I mean is, um, it took us two years to figure out how to sell in Brazil. And a big reason we were not selling in Brazil, and Brazil's actually going to be our biggest market this quarter. Uh, and it really started turning. In September of twenty four. And the reason was we started localizing the product. And so we made it obviously in Portuguese, but it's more than that. It's tying it into the actual way people use the product. Brazil has an incredibly sophisticated financial ecosystem. I would say in some sense, even more sophisticated than the US. There's no cash, everything is digitized, it's instant. In fact, like when they come to the US and ACH takes two days, it's almost like, what are you guys doing? And so it took us a while to figure out how to localize the product.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  And the reason, I think that's important to your question of like, how do these companies use us? We usually start with the card and then we sell second and third products. So second and third products could be different depending on the country that we're in. So in Mexico and Colombia, usually that moves into Jeeves Pay, which is our payment product. In Brazil, we actually have a very strong travel product. So if you think about Brazil, a big concern there is fraud. It has one of the highest fraud rates in the world. And so we had customers that would come to us and say, hey, if you have cards that are automatically turning themselves off, meaning they're single use, we would use that for all transactions. And so we started playing around with, okay, let's build out a cards API that now we provide to these different companies. And so when you think about Nubank, you have corporate spend and then you have travel.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  So those are the two areas that we kind of work with them on. And that travel component is strong in Brazil, but might not be as strong in other countries. So I'm kind of getting to the point where we have this strong primary product, which is usually the card. And then the secondary product kind of changes depending on the region that we're in, and that tends to be localized.

• 14:35Angela Strange?

  So we were fortunate enough to get to Leader Series A. And every investment has a why now. And the why now at Jeeves when you started, which I felt pretty strongly as I had a broad portfolio in Latin America, all of whom had tens of millions of dollars in their bank account and they could not get corporate cards. And if they could, they'd be from incumbents that made US incumbents look like the most tax-free companies on the planet. So that was a good why now then. I think now you've got two more, which are even stronger. AI and stablecoins.

• 15:06Angela Strange?

  And so before we maybe dive into specifically for Jeeves, as you think about the region of Latam and the countries that you're in, like those tailwinds, I would argue are even stronger there than in the US.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So stablecoin, let's start with that one because I think in Latin America, stablecoins is a lived experience. It's not something that's a theory. Like in Argentina, 60% of the population use stablecoins. Like that's not something you have to train people how to use. And so in the US, it's a little more like, okay, why would I use stablecoins?

• 15:37Angela Strange?

  I think Americans don't quite get it.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I have a stable US currency. Amazing. That's fantastic. A lot of countries don't have that.

• 15:42Angela Strange?

  Yes.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  And so the fact that you have this dollar-denominated coin that you can almost instantly transfer your local currency to is a huge, huge selling point. And so what we started realizing, and again, a big part of this was the Genius Act passing, which started making it more kosher to talk through stablecoin, was that a lot of the infrastructure we had could now be adapted towards stablecoin. And going back to your question earlier, the reason we can do that is because, again, we maintain our own ledger. So we don't have to have two separate ledgers, one for USDC, one for USD. It all feeds into the same thing. And so as soon as the Genius Act passed, it was one of those things where I would say it's a little bit founder-led. I was just like, this is happening? Like, this is not debatable?

• 16:24Angela Strange?

  Stablecoin, stablecoin founder mode, yes.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  We're going to go build this whole thing. And in fact, even today, I mean, you can ask our team. We have three stand-ups every day, not every day, every week, and I run them directly.

• 16:32Angela Strange?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Because to me, it's that important that we move everything on to stablecoin, because I see that as absolutely the future. And specifically for Latam, which is one of the highest corridors of stablecoin usage, it just becomes something that people know how to use and the product becomes a lot better. I think the second part on stablecoin that I think is very interesting is when we sell it to these enterprises, we actually don't pitch stablecoin directly. We actually pitch it as Jeeves Instant Pay. But the inside is stablecoin. And the reason that's important is when you talk to a CFO at an enterprise company, they don't care as much on the technology side. They care, can I trust you? Is the money going to show up? And then is this something where, you know, the cost is better than what I have right now? And if they don't think the money is going to show up, it doesn't matter what the technology is, because at the end of the day,

• 17:16Speaker 00

  they're going to get probably fired. And so we have to win that trust and we almost kind of guarantee it with the Jeeves brand of like, hey, you use us for all these other things, trust us on this and we'll make sure it shows up. And that's how we kind of sell the product in region. And that's been a huge driver of the volume that we're seeing. And our TPV has increased. From about 400 million two years ago to north of 3 billion right now, and we're probably going to touch about 6 billion this year. So it's significantly increased and a big part of that is because we have the stablecoin as the infrastructure in between.

• 17:46Angela Strange?

  So maybe contrast the, and you've got some more innovative products coming out, but to start with the sort of classic cross-border, contrast fiat rails versus stablecoin rails, because you're serving both customers.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  So if you think about just where we were maybe 18 months ago before we had stablecoin, and you wanted to do a payment between Mexico and the US, you would usually have to have two different correspondent banks in between. You'd send the payment in Mexico, we'd have to make sure that we had a bank partner that could handle it in the US, because in the US, you need to know the source of the funds as well. So we basically had two different bank partners that had to do a handoff to transfer, let's say, 1,000 pesos and get it to show up for $50 in the US. Now, what happens is in Mexico, you can send us 1,000 pesos. We collect it on the ground in Mexico. As soon as we collect it, we release USDC, and that settles instantly, and then we pay out on the US side. The longest leg is actually the US payout, because in Mexico, that settles instantly, and the ACH again, still takes

• 18:42Speaker 00

  one day, but it's much, much, much faster. And now for the end user, we don't sell the stablecoin. We sell accounts payable. We sell your invoices are reconciled. We sell, you know, put in your tax ID, we'll download your invoices and send international payments. That's what we sell. It just so happens that the infrastructure that it runs on is now a lot better, because we can do that in one hour instead of one day or two days. And so that's the way we kind of look at it, which is, we give the end user the choice. If they want to use our Swift Rails and get the MT103 kind of confirmation, we can do that. We can do that for you, just it'll take longer, but that's your choice. If you want to use a faster version, which we call GGS Instant Pay, you can do that in the product, you just have to click a dropdown and select that. So we give you that choice, but a lot of the way we kind of sell it is it's part of the product.

• 19:26Angela Strange?

  Yeah. Would you like your money in a day or five days?

• 19:29Speaker 00

  You'd be surprised how many pick one day.

• 19:31Angela Strange?

  Oh my god, not surprised, not surprised. Yeah, exactly. Not surprised at all. Amazing. And then, coming back to Argentina, where I think anyone who's been there, lived there, can get a sense of, you know, money at the end of the year is worse, nothing close to what it was at the start of the year. You're about to launch a stablecoin card.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:48Angela Strange?

  Who is that for and how is that gonna work?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, taking a step back, and you probably remember this when we first chatted, the goal of Jeeves is really to build an enterprise version of Revolut. So, a global business bank that can function in multiple countries. So, to be able to do that, you have to launch multiple countries. And so, previously, launching a country is a big undertaking, because you have to first get local entities, you know, get, like, again, this example, local issuing licenses, you need to be able to collect funds. So it would usually take about eight months, and that's very fast. We were probably the fastest to be able to do that in eight months. And that would cost maybe five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred thousand dollars to just get spun up. Now with stablecoin, and Argentina's our first new country launch in three years, we're super, super excited about this. You can do that whole thing much, much faster and much cheaper.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And so, in Argentina, we have our own pay-in rails. So you can pay in on Argentinean peso. As soon as it gets, as soon as it comes in, it converts to USDC. So you instantly get currency volatility protection, which in Argentina, where our currency devalues, is a huge, huge, huge selling point. As soon as it converts to USDC, we can issue corporate cards on it. And now, if you think about our core product, it's not necessarily just the stablecoin or the payments. We sell the layer on top. We sell the operating system. So now we can sell budgets, we can sell approval flows, we can sell teams, we can sell card controls, we can sell fraud controls. All of that can now work. And what's really, really cool about this setup and very unique, compared to a lot of other stablecoin cards in the market, is if you swipe that card in Argentina, it does not have an FX fee.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  And the reason that's important is the customers we go after are mid-market and enterprise customers. They have fifty employees.

• 21:21Angela Strange?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  You're not gonna get a card for fifty employees if you're gonna get charged two percent when they buy a coke. Like, that's just not gonna work. And so, it's a really, really cool version of a product that we've used a lot of different technologies to piece together, but now allows us to sell. The full product suite in Argentina and tying this back to kind of the what Argentina is, what it's going to become is it's going to be become the blueprint for other countries. And so take Peru, for instance, nobody's going to launch an expense management suite for Peru. It's too small of a town. Now we can now I I basically have to staff two salespeople in Peru. They'll sell this product out there. I can I can onboard 10 companies and it can still be a profitable market.

• 21:59Angela Strange?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  So the cost is completely collapsed in a way that, you know, previously like no one's going to launch in Peru. Now we can launch in Peru because my cost is three sales headcount. It's amazing.

• 22:09Angela Strange?

  So I want to shift gears a little bit to AI, which I think has been the other like, oh, thank God. Like, for instance, I think one of the things we all underestimated was just KYB in, for instance, Mexico. And just the volume of documents you need to collect, what you need to link into.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Languages.

• 22:26Angela Strange?

  Languages, exactly. So that is an example.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:30Angela Strange?

  But maybe talk through where are you using it in Jeeves? And then what is the impact that it's had on the business?

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we it's one of those things where, you know, just like a lot of companies, we've tried to figure out how to incorporate it across the board. I would say some functions we're seeing a lot more adoption than other functions. If you think about anything tied to document in ingesting, we've seen a lot of success there. So I'll just give you an example. I was kind of mentioning again, our product core product is like a like a 30 day charge card, like a Ramper Brex. That still requires us to cover the customer spend for 30 days. So again, it's not a credit card. You can't keep it open. You have to pay us on day 31, but for 30 days we are covering your spend. That requires underwriting. Our underwriting team today is four people and that team is doing two, three billion in TPV. That just wouldn't have been possible two and a half years ago.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  You need 15 people just to get that off the ground. That's what's changed. The models are better. It's self learning. One person that's really smart can make this work in multiple different regions. So that's one example, but we're seeing that across the board. So the only real headcounts we're adding are some components of engineering and product and then go to market. And go to market is one area where we haven't had as much success using AI. And we're trying different components for like enriching data, et cetera. And so we do hire humans there, but on almost all the other functions, we're seeing a significant, significant uplift using using AI. And I think the biggest number is that our headcount today is 140 people and two years ago was 200 people. And our revenue has significantly increased. And that's why you see that margin expansion.

• 24:05Speaker 00

  Basically, revenues are going up and costs are the same or going down.

• 24:08Angela Strange?

  Yep. Well, customer service, I think, is another notoriously challenging in multiple different languages, multiple different countries.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Customer service is one where we do have our own internal kind of chatbot. We call it Lenora. Uh, and yeah, it handles most of kind of what people bring up. I think what's interesting is, and it's taken us a little while to, to learn this is just the cultural nuances. So, um, you know, everybody's got OCR, but it took us a while to figure out that in Brazil, they use, um, the commas and the dots interchangeably. And so when you're doing underwriting and you see the commas, the commas are actually the dots and, and vice versa. And so like that training is what, what needs like specialization. And that's again, special, specialized to just J's and what we do. So yeah, it is something where we've seen it across the board. Customer service for sure. KYB, I think document ingestion is another area that we've been using that as well.

• 24:58Angela Strange?

  Yep. Great. And so now I want to fast forward a little bit to the future. And you gave us a little bit of a preview about this, right? Like it's getting easier to launch more countries. Things are coming more global. As you think of, you know, global business bank, two years from now, five years from now, like what does that look like? What might be a little less intuitive to anybody?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, so I actually think a lot more, um, is going to go on chain. And so, so there's, there's two, three things that we are thinking about. So like, if you think about a business like ours, we have to still maintain capital pools, uh, in different markets, right? So we have to maintain pesos, B R L, uh, Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos, et cetera. We maintain a lot. What would be very interesting, which is what we're starting to dabble into is actually just keeping a single source of U S D C or U S D T and minting when we need it. So that way the cost of capital significantly drops and we don't have to maintain these pools. So when I think about where this goes from an infrastructure perspective, I actually see a lot of the existing stack moving on chain. So the second part of this is going back to kind of that whole one, two, three billion T P V that we do.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  Uh, is there a world where we can start collateralizing that on chain? So we basically take the receivables, put it on chain, get sixty, seventy percent against that on U S D C. It doesn't remove our existing capital sources, but it helps supplement that with on-chain U S D C. So when I think about where the infrastructure is going, I see the entire company stack. Moving on to stablecoin in the next two, three years, and I think it's actually going to make it a much more efficient company that we can operate in. And then the last one, which we've been dabbling with right now, is basically thinking of programmable money, right? So you have obviously the agents that are going to be doing purchasing from MCP, CLIs, etc. But then how do you make that something that's very usable for these different companies that we service? And so today, we do have two agents that we sell.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  We have a lot more, but those are the ones that resonate the most. One is a reconciliation agent. So it basically looks at the purchases you have and then helps you kind of match them one to one. And then the other one is a GL coding agent. So if you think about enterprises, a big, big function is literally someone's job is to look at every transaction and put a code on it so your ERP can read it. And we trained a, an agent to be able to do that at 99% accuracy or better. One of the huge advantages we have is the companies that we sell to look like Jeeves. We are operating in 12 countries. We have 60-plus bankruptcies. We have sophisticated finance to be operating in LatAm. So if our finance team can use it and they find that it's valuable, I'm pretty confident I can sell that product, right? So that's a really huge advantage that we have.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  And as I look at the next two to three, four, five years, I see this convergence of stablecoin. I see the convergence of agents. Money is going to become programmable and hopefully we're at that, you know, nexus of all of this happening.

• 27:41Angela Strange?

  Amazing. All right, I want to, I want to wrap maybe with a couple more personal questions about you that could be helpful. I think there's, there's going to be more global businesses built. I think huge opportunities there, very challenging. You've talked pretty publicly about how you need to almost reinvent your superpower every six to eight months. Like, what, what do you think your superpower was when you started?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:01Angela Strange?

  And how it's not evolving?

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think a lot of founders try to do, try to do a lot of different things when they start. And when you start, the way I see it is your job is to focus on one. Or two maximum metrics that matter. And then like you need to be like a monkey with a stick. Which is like, how do you move that metric? And everything else doesn't matter. And then, once those metrics are moving, then you figure out other things to do. So I'll give you an example. When we started, our number one metric is spend. It's not revenue, it's not necessarily, does it have margin? It's can I get someone to use this card in Latin America? I don't know, I did not grow up in Latin America. Actually, when I first flew to Mexico City, it was kind of dawning on me. I'm like, I'm gonna launch this product in Mexico. And I've, and that was the second time.

• 28:42Angela Strange?

  My Spanish is a little rusty.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  It's potato. So, uh, but, but that was the focus. It was just focused on can we get people to use the cards? It started there, we were clearly getting acceleration on the spend. And then we figured out all the other things, revenue, we figured out margin, etc. I think a lot of times founders try to do everything in the beginning. And in the beginning, you need to just focus on what matters to get you from point A to point B. And then the second part, which is where I think most founders need to really focus on is you have to be seventy percent good at almost every function.

• 29:12Angela Strange?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  And you just have to rotate. And like, that's your job. Today, your job is product. Today, I spent a lot of time on product engineering. It's just so, so important with stablecoin. Two years ago was finance, because we were navigating twenty-three and interest rates had shot up six hundred percent. And that, like, every day I was on these calls. And, and that was a job. And now we have an amazing CFO, amazing finance team. So now I'm like, I don't need to spend that much time. But as a, as a CEO, as a founder, your job is to do whatever job is needed for the company to get to the next stage. And I think a lot of times founders are like, oh, I can't do sales. It's like, nobody can do sales. You just, like, you learn what you need to do. And then you hire someone better than you. That, like, that's also a skill. But you have to be dangerous enough to know what you're looking at, right? And then I think that's now even more easier with AI. And so if people can't do that now, I don't know what to say, so.

• 29:58Angela Strange?

  Yep. Even if you don't have an AI thesis, you should be able to lead.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it's amazing, yeah.

• 30:04Angela Strange?

  And then maybe I think the other biggest challenge building a company anywhere is talent. And how do you think about talent? What is Jeeves' philosophy? Especially being in the number of countries that you're in.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. So we need local talent to succeed. And that's like the first hire we do in any geo, actually in Argentina, we just hired this person is what we call kind of a local GM. They have to be local, they have to know the market, they have to live there because I'm not the one selling on the ground. So that's always the first hire. What we look for, we have this internal, you know, kind of like bar, which is, we call it relentlessness. Like we, there's no real playbook for what we're doing. Like there's different types of playbooks, but no one's launching this in 25 countries with multiple product stacks. And everyone's like, are you guys doing too much? And are you guys doing too little? But that's what we do, that's what we offer. And so you need to have this just very, very high motor that is constantly just going.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  The good thing with a company like Jeeves is you'll know within probably a week if this is the right fit. Because it's either going to be like, holy shit, I'm learning so much. Or it's going to be like, I don't know what's happening. I feel like I'm drowning every day. And a lot of people, you know, like cycle out fairly quickly, which I think is fine. Like it might not be the right fit. So we really push that engine part of like, you have to just have this high, high bar and keep, keep going. And then the second part here is one thing we've been able to do is bring in good seasoned leaders for like the second cycle of Jeeves, right? So the first cycle is a zero to one cycle. You know, this year we should be crossing hopefully a hundred million in top line ARR. And we need a second set of leaders. And I think we've done a very good job, at least so far, of getting those seasoned leaders. We brought in a CRO from Brex.

• 31:41Speaker 00

  We brought in a risk officer from Capital One that joined us last year. Our CFO took Pioneer Public. Like getting those people to join has really upped the talent bar in the company as well.

• 31:50Angela Strange?

  Very focused on stable coins.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:52Angela Strange?

  You've also been chief AI officer of Jeeves.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:57Angela Strange?

  I think it is, it is a huge advantage if you started pre-AI, you have the distribution and then you can use that to really drive it forward. I think the challenge though is getting the company to be AI natives.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:10Angela Strange?

  So maybe you talked to her, how do you make that happen? And how do AI benefit?

• 32:13Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a good. Good question. So today we are at one hundred and forty people. We were at two hundred people two years ago and our revenue has grown ten X, our volume has grown eight X. So clearly it's accelerating and it's accelerating with less people. This just wouldn't be possible without AI. So I'll walk through some concrete examples where we use it. So one, uh, which I think is really important is we use it on the underwriting side. We do pretty serious underwriting for any company that comes to us because just like a ramp or Brax, we have to give them thirty days of spend and then at the end of thirty days they have to pay us back. So we need to know that they're good to pay us back on day thirty one. And today we have a team of four people, uh, that does this underwriting across all these regions. And that just simply wouldn't have been possible even two years ago. You'd need fifteen people just to get the underwriting going.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Better models, self-learning models, self-training models. We have a lot of data and now the models are actually keeping up with the data. So that's a huge unlock. Same thing when you think about customer service. We again have maybe three people on the customer service team and we have to handle different languages. We have to handle people that are obviously talking about payments, but then also cards and also AP. We just are starting to test an AR product and it's a very small team. Would not be possible without training what we have on the customer service side to be able to handle that. So I think that's another area. And then if you think about KYB and document ingestion, that's an area where we had to build our own version of, you know, an OCR machine. Because again, even if you can do Spanish and Portuguese, there are little nuances. Like in Brazil, uh, the commas and the dots are intertwined.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  So if you look at something and it says two thousand dollars, it's actually two hundred thousand dollars because the comma and the dot is switched. And it took us a while to train our models to be do, to be able to do that. But just like your question on the infrastructure, we want to own this core infrastructure ourselves. I think without that, we will not be able to succeed. And that to me falls on the founder and the, and the CEO. Like if you are not AI-pilled, uh, you're not going to make it. And, and I think part of what I've been pushing internally is just, look, we are pre-AI and we are trying to make that jump. If you think you're fast at 3X, there are native AI companies that are moving at 10X. So you're still slow and like you need to be 20X just to keep up with the 10X. And so just making that pace, but if you don't have that pace yourself and you don't set that like

• 34:22Speaker 00

  clockbeat, it's not gonna happen. You can't outsource this, you can't hire a chief AI person like you can hire that and there are many very smart people, but that energy, that pace has to come from, from the CEO. Thankfully, I have a little bit of a technical background and so I'm one of those maybe annoyingly dangerous CEOs where I'm like, oh, I'm good enough to tell you what to do, but then you can go figure out what to do. But I feel so unblocked as a ex-engineer now with AI because I feel like I can actually start building. I mean, I like another example, as soon as OpenClaw came out, like I built the first OpenClaw for G's, not because I'm like some genius, but if I don't do it, everyone's gonna say, hey, what's the security, et cetera. And there are real security things you need to figure out. But if you don't show that you can build an OpenClaw and someone can tag it in a WhatsApp

• 35:06Speaker 00

  channel and it's gonna give you jokes or whatever you wanna do, then people just don't feel like they can do it themselves. And so I, it's just so important and you know, everybody says the same thing, you don't have enough time, et cetera. You have to make the time. Like if it's important for the company to succeed, you need AI. And if it's important to do AI, you need to do it. I mean, you need to do it, you need to figure out the time. And so that's how I've kind of thought about it and you know, candidly, it helps that it's actually very exciting building in AI. It doesn't feel like a chore. Like I wish I had more time because there's just so much I can do. And every week it feels like Anthropic is releasing something else and I'm like, give me one day as I can catch up to this.

• 35:39Angela Strange?

  Amazing. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I'm sure the great enterprises of Peru will be very happy, very happy to hear you can now economically launch there and appreciate you coming on the pod.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. This is fantastic. And yeah, if there are companies out there that you know, are looking to build that stable coin and AI, we'd love for them to try us and give us feedback. Send an email directly to me and you know, I'll respond probably pretty quickly.

• 36:02Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 36:27Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.