Investing in Augustus

We’re excited to announce our investment in Augustus. Augustus is building the Global Dollar Bank: a full-service US national bank chartered to provide better, direct dollar access to global fintechs and banks. In May, the OCC granted Augustus conditional approval to establish its national bank. This charter lets customers hold and move both stablecoins and traditional dollars from a single account, through a single banking relationship. Behind it all, underwriting, transaction monitoring, compliance, and clearing run on AI systems, with people supervising the systems rather than manually handling each step.

Variant invests in tech that expands autonomy, and a key enabler of autonomy is access to and control over your money. Billions of people live in emerging markets with currencies that lose value and banking systems that lock them out; stablecoins have become their way in. Across emerging markets, neobanks use stablecoins to offer people key financial services. Critical to this story is access to the US dollar, since stablecoins are overwhelmingly dollar-denominated, so the companies offering them need actual dollars behind every account. Today, this dollar access runs through a handful of legacy clearing banks. The incumbents set minimums only the largest companies can meet, and the remaining providers come with compliance friction and correspondent relationships too weak to handle real volume. Everyone else routes through intermediaries, with each layer adding cost and delay. The market is overdue for a competitor built from first principles. Augustus is that competitor, offering dollar clearing that is instant and always on, enabled through one banking relationship rather than a chain of intermediaries. Its AI-native design makes its entire operation more efficient, from compliance to settlement, which is what allows Augustus to provide clearing at prices and speeds incumbents can’t.

We believe this is the team to build a next-generation clearing bank, which takes the right blend of extreme ambition and deep regulatory expertise. Ferdinand Dabitz, a Thiel Fellow, leads as CEO, and at 25 he will become the youngest CEO of a federally chartered bank in the modern era. Greg Quarles, bank president, has spent two decades at the OCC and was CEO at Green Dot Bank. Benjamin Alexander comes in as CCO, having previously served as CCO at Column Bank and built HSBC’s correspondent banking program. It is exactly the combination Augustus requires: founders hungry enough to rebuild the clearing bank from scratch, working alongside people who have spent their careers inside the very institutions being rebuilt. We couldn’t be more excited to back them.