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Stablecoins for the Fortune 500 w/ Dileep Thazhmon · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Intro: Passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act, because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:13
  Dante Reminick: Welcome back everyone to the Stable Pulse.
• 0:16
  Dante Reminick: My name is Dante Reminick.
• 0:18
  Dante Reminick: We have a very special guest here and a really, really well-timed episode, I feel.
• 0:23
  Dante Reminick: So without further ado, I'm just going to get right into it.
• 0:26
  Dante Reminick: Dileep, welcome to the show.
• 0:28
  Dante Reminick: As you know from being a longtime listener, we always start with an episode or a segment that we call Braggadocious.
• 0:34
  Dante Reminick: We use this as an opportunity for you to brag about yourself and all of the really awesome stuff that you have built.
• 0:39
  Dante Reminick: You have a lot of reason to brag, uh, especially recently.
• 0:43
  Dante Reminick: So I'm going to sit back and shut up.
• 0:45
  Dante Reminick: Tell us about yourself.
• 0:46
  Dante Reminick: Tell us about what you've built.
• 0:47
  Dante Reminick: Please, please, please do not be humble.
• 0:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: Well, forest, thanks for having me on, Dante.
• 0:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: I've heard a lot uh about the show, and so I'm really excited to be here.
• 0:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um I'm Daliep, I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Jeeves.
• 1:00
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um, this round that we are just announcing, which was about two days ago, uh, was a $110 million round.
• 1:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: And what's really interesting is that we have always been building in the financial infrastructure ecosystem focused on enterprises.
• 1:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: But this round is really for us to go deeper into stablecoin.
• 1:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: So taking a step back, what do we do?
• 1:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: So Jeeves provides a financial operating system for global enterprises.
• 1:24
  Dileep Thazhmon: And what does that mean?
• 1:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: If you're a company like BMW or uh Lululemon or H ⁇ M that uses Jeeves today, what we give you is a uh combined operating system that includes cards in 25 to 30 countries.
• 1:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you do not need a corporate card for your employees in the US, plus another one in UK, another one in Brazil, etc.
• 1:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: All of that we do.
• 1:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then we also do payments in and out to 190 countries, and we just launched accounts receivable.
• 1:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so really the pitch is if you're a company that operates in more than one country, we can combine your stack and fix it and make it much, much easier so you get kind of one login and everything kind of lives together.
• 1:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: And we do own a lot of infrastructure to be able to do that.
• 2:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: Now, on to the side about things to brag on, um, I would say for us, it's really been impressive to see the growth in the last eight months.
• 2:10
  Dileep Thazhmon: We really launched our stablecoin product in January, and we just crossed a billion and a half in annualized TPV, so that's north of 130, 140 million a month in eight months.
• 2:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I think you know, a lot of times when you think about stablecoin use cases, they tend to be focused on uh small businesses.
• 2:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: So Pfypers and e-commerce company, the digital nomad, uh sometimes it's PSPs and FinTechs.
• 2:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: We sell to enterprises.
• 2:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: So it's the actual opposite of that, where you've got to go sell the full enterprise sales cycle, and then stablecoin is part of that.
• 2:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: So for me, that's something that we're very proud about and you know I think is really important.
• 2:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then I think the other side that is also very important is we're one of the few companies that combine both fiat and stablecoin.
• 2:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have real infrastructure, we have real licenses, we have three principal memberships for card issuing.
• 2:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh we can do payoffs to 190 countries, and on top of that, we build the stablecoin layer.
• 2:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: And to be able to do that, so far, we've moved about 5 billion in annualized TPV, and that's grown about 10x in the last two years.
• 3:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: So the business is clearly hitting this inflection point, which is why uh we did this round.
• 3:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh me personally, I'm a second-time founder, so this is my second company.
• 3:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: Before this, I started a company in marketing automation space, hated the space, but sold the company um for about 100 million plus, and we raised about 19 million, very different time, but good outcome for everybody.
• 3:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh and then the problem I'm trying to solve with Jeeves was something I'd seen in that company, which is if you operate in two countries, we did, you needed two different bank accounts, two different corporate cards, two different payment reels.
• 3:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then at the end of the month, when I say, hey, you know, CFO or my team, like how much did we spend last month?
• 3:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: Nobody knows.
• 3:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: Takes you 30 days to answer that question.
• 3:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so that was this core problem pre-stable coin that was just kind of like haunting me, but I'm like, I have to figure out how to solve this.
• 3:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh and that's the genesis of what kind of Jeeves is today.
• 3:52
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 3:52
  Dante Reminick: First of all, that's a fantastic introduction.
• 3:54
  Dante Reminick: I have many, many questions.
• 3:57
  Dante Reminick: And so I hope that we can I hope that we can keep this efficient, but I doubt that we'll be able to.
• 4:01
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, no.
• 4:02
  Dante Reminick: First, I mean, you guys sell to major, major enterprises that have absolutely nothing to do with stable coins, right?
• 4:09
  Dante Reminick: You mentioned Lululemon, you mentioned BMW.
• 4:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: They don't care enough about stable coins.
• 4:13
  Dante Reminick: They they don't care about stable coins, right?
• 4:15
  Dante Reminick: When you are going to pitch these folks, do you talk about stable coins?
• 4:20
  Dante Reminick: Or are you just pitching better financial services that just so happen to be powered by stable coins in the bank?
• 4:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it's it's exactly the latter.
• 4:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and if you think about it, when you go pitch we do payments, nobody says we do ACH.
• 4:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: You just say we do payments, and like the payments show up.
• 4:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: No one's like, okay, what's the protocol and the rail that you it's just one, do I trust you?
• 4:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: Two, what's the cost?
• 4:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: Three, is the money gonna show up or am I gonna get fired as a CFO because the money never showed up?
• 4:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that's what they care about, right?
• 4:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: And that's what we sell.
• 4:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and it's interesting because we don't hide stablecoin, it's just abstracted away.
• 4:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so what that means is one of the things that we do, which is probably the hardest thing we do, is we maintain our own ledger in 25 countries.
• 4:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that means at the end of the month, when you say, hey, the leap, give me a statement for my account, that statement line by line is generated by Gs.
• 5:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: We don't go to a third party, get it, and send it to you.
• 5:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: And it sounds easy, but that's actually the hardest thing we do, because that means your ledger, your data, your FX, this is 25 countries.
• 5:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: So multiple currencies has to be perfect.
• 5:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: And if it isn't, you're gonna hear that in the first like 30 minutes because someone's gonna tell you the numbers off it and I'm not gonna pay that.
• 5:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: Right.
• 5:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so that that's really the muscle we built.
• 5:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: And because we built that ledger, adding stablecoin is just another currency.
• 5:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so we were able to make the ledger just 10 times more efficient.
• 5:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: And to your point, we don't sell, hey, come to us for stablecoin.
• 5:35
  Dileep Thazhmon: We say we actually call the product Jeeves Instant Pay.
• 5:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh so it's stablecoin, but like the product that we sell is Jeeves Instant Pay, and we say, hey, you can use regular or you can use instant pay.
• 5:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: Here's a cost, here's a price, blah, blah.
• 5:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then you pick.
• 5:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: And as you can probably expect, you know, people tend to pick instant pay.
• 5:50
  Dante Reminick: Interesting.
• 5:50
  Dante Reminick: And so a lot of your competitors that are competing with you for deals like BMW and Lululemon, are they also using stable coins?
• 5:58
  Dante Reminick: Or are you guys able to go in there and offer better financial technology because you are using stable coins when your competitors are not?
• 6:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, so it's it's very interesting because if you like if you take stablecoin payments, right?
• 6:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and this is kind of the the the cry that everyone's hearing right now, which is FX fees are getting compressed, right?
• 6:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like if you think about the off-ramp from USD or USDC to USD, that used to be 1%.
• 6:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: Now it's five bips.
• 6:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's gonna be zero, like complete compression, right?
• 6:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's a hundred bips that you've lost.
• 6:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: FX, same thing's happening.
• 6:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: You'll you're gonna lose all your FX.
• 6:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's gonna be some fees, but it's nothing like the fat spread that that's there.
• 6:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's actually great for us because what we sell is not the FX, it's the entire workflow automation before the FX.
• 6:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, as an example, in Mexico, we have a product where you can put in your tax ID, we'll go download all your receipt, uh, your invoices from the central database, fill in the information, you hit a button, we'll send the payment.
• 6:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: The last step, that's the payment, and that's FX and all of that stuff.
• 6:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: But we charge you for everything else before the last step.
• 6:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we can actually subsidize the cost of FX, you know, give it away close to free, because that's not where we make money.
• 7:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: We make money on all the other steps before that.
• 7:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: And that's the difference between the product that we have, even pre-stablecoin, which is we sell financial automation, we sell efficiency gains.
• 7:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's what a CFO of a 5,000 person company cares about.
• 7:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: They don't care about five bips or 10 bips here or there, which is just a very different audience from like an SB.
• 7:21
  Dante Reminick: Interesting.
• 7:21
  Dante Reminick: And so are you guys able to do FX better and compress those rates more because you're built on a stablecoin stack?
• 7:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, so we do the classic kind of stablecoin sandwich, so to speak.
• 7:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: So I'll give you an example.
• 7:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: Previously, two years ago, you could have come to Jeeves and say, hey, I want to do a payment between uh, let's say Mexico and Europe, right?
• 7:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: And you'll say, great, put in your information for CEPA, hit send, we collect your funds in Mexico, send it to correspondent bank one, send the second bank, and then they pay it out.
• 7:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: Takes about one to two days.
• 7:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: Now you come to Jeeves, it actually looks exactly the same.
• 7:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's the same information, it's still SEPA.
• 7:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: You hit send, but now what happens is we collect your funds in Mexico.
• 7:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: As soon as we do, we release USDC or USDT, whatever you want, and then we pay out on the other side.
• 8:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: It takes one to two hours.
• 8:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: But everything else looks exactly the same.
• 8:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: Same platform, same statements, blended with your cards.
• 8:10
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's what we sell.
• 8:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: It just so happens, exactly like you're saying, that the stack that's you know providing the money movement is stablecoin.
• 8:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: But we don't go in and say, hey, come to us just to access the stablecoin.
• 8:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's that's not where we're even.
• 8:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: There are many companies that are very good at that, but that's not like where I see our differentiation.
• 8:27
  Dante Reminick: Is it fair to say that you're fighting to be the primary financial relationship with these large enterprises?
• 8:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: I we want to be the primary financial relationship slash operating system.
• 8:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it's actually a very good point because the number one uh competition that we see is usually a local bank.
• 8:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: So these companies they tend to have a private bank or they tend to have someone they can call and say, hey, I need to send this money.
• 8:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: And the guy's like, great, like let me help you with that, blah, blah, blah.
• 8:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because these are bigger companies.
• 8:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: And we say, keep that.
• 8:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, don't lose that.
• 8:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's amazing, keep it.
• 8:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: But what we can give you that your bank is not going to give you is unlimited virtual cards, which in a country like Brazil is actually very important because there's a lot of fraud.
• 9:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so we have this product that's single-use cards.
• 9:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: So companies can just literally call the card.
• 9:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: You don't need a human in the loop, it's agentic, API, whatever you want.
• 9:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: And the card just spins up, gives you a number, you use the number, and the card dies.
• 9:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so there's very minimal fraud because you can't use the card, and the reconciliation is very high.
• 9:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: And we have companies that will do 100,000 cards a month.
• 9:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: A bank is never gonna give you that, right?
• 9:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so that's how we compete, which is like keep the bank, we're the operating layer, we're the layer that sits on top of all the banks.
• 9:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: And you should keep your bank.
• 9:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: Banks are great.
• 9:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: We work with them, we have a lot of bank camps.
• 9:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's awesome, right?
• 9:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: But like what they're not gonna do is say six things, they're not gonna give you cards in Portugal for Brazilian business, the Spanish cards for Mexican business, because that's not where they win.
• 9:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's where we went, right?
• 9:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so it again, this these the spaces we compete in, it's it's so big.
• 9:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's not a winner-take-all market.
• 9:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's not like it's you know one versus the other.
• 9:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: These are trillion dollar spaces, right?
• 9:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: And you win one, two, three percent.
• 9:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, you're talking about a massive, massive, massive company.
• 10:01
  Dante Reminick: So you don't make your money on FX.
• 10:02
  Dante Reminick: Where do you make your money?
• 10:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: We we we actually it's really interesting.
• 10:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um if you look at our revenue stream, right?
• 10:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and and just for classification, right?
• 10:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: We're we're falling firmly into like that expense management box, right?
• 10:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that's that's our core product is cards, we have payments, just the standard things, and we move it around, blah, blah.
• 10:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: What's really interesting is for us, interchange is less than 40% of the business.
• 10:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: Most expense management companies, interchange is 80 to 90% of your business.
• 10:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: That that's the that's the biggest chunk of your revenues, interchange BRECS, et cetera, et cetera.
• 10:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: For us, it's less than 40%.
• 10:35
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so it's a very, very blended revenue stream where 40% is cards, so that's interchange plus our cards API.
• 10:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: 40% is payments, but payments is not FX.
• 10:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's the workflow automation that we charge for.
• 10:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: It includes FX, but like that's not the big driver, so that's about 80%.
• 10:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then we charge a lot of fees, um, about 15 to 18% is fees.
• 10:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: So it looks a little bit more like a revolute than uh what I call it is like an enterprise version of Revolute where you have this massive engine that's very profitable, that's growing, and then you get to take all these other bets and then subsidize it and kind of eat the market share.
• 11:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: Is that your margin is my, you know, like whatever the the thing was from your margin is my opportunity.
• 11:13
  Dileep Thazhmon: My opportunity.
• 11:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because I can subsidize it, right?
• 11:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because I'm making money somewhere else.
• 11:17
  Dante Reminick: So maybe I I'm approaching this the wrong way and trying to categorize you when I should not be.
• 11:23
  Dante Reminick: But like I think that when I hear people talking about Jeeves, oftentimes they use the word neobank, right?
• 11:30
  Dante Reminick: And so to your point, you mentioned Revolute.
• 11:32
  Dante Reminick: You just mentioned that you're an expense management platform, much more akin to something like ramp.
• 11:38
  Dante Reminick: But in reality, you're this like weird, sexy hybrid between between the two, right?
• 11:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: You'll probably figure that out faster than a lot of investors have dead of it, which is it's it's it's it's exactly that.
• 11:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's everyone's like, okay, what box is it?
• 11:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the thing is now the boxes have changed.
• 11:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, like Ramp is an AI company.
• 11:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, like the boxes, there's no one specific, you know, thing of like, oh, I get it, you're exactly this we're not.
• 12:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like we operate in 35 countries.
• 12:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: We're 200 people.
• 12:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, not a lot of companies do that.
• 12:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: We do card issuing directly.
• 12:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, we are the issuing entity.
• 12:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's like you get a card that says issued by Jeeves, not a bank.
• 12:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's us.
• 12:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like we issue the cards directly.
• 12:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like we go very, very deep in the stack, and yes, part of it is expense management, part of it is payments.
• 12:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: But it's very hard to just put into this one box and be like, what is this company?
• 12:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I think most successful companies in the next five years, the ones you see, the ones that are growing very fast, they're gonna look like this.
• 12:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: They're gonna pick the best parts of what worked for them and have this hybrid product because that's what's also now changed with AI.
• 12:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: You just can build so much more than you could before.
• 12:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's actually very interesting.
• 12:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: I had this conversation internally, uh, and we were using this metaphor of like at bats.
• 12:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: If you think about it three years ago, right?
• 12:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and like let's say the euro is starting, you're like, hey, we're gonna do two bets.
• 12:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: We're gonna do A and we're gonna do B.
• 12:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: And we're gonna spend all this time, we're gonna build it out.
• 12:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: I need at least one of them to work just to make the Euro worthwhile, right?
• 12:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: So I need one out of two.
• 13:00
  Dileep Thazhmon: Now with AI, I can do 10 bets.
• 13:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I I if I get three of those.
• 13:04
  Dante Reminick: You still only need one or two to work.
• 13:05
  Dante Reminick: Exactly, right?
• 13:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: So like the amount you can do is so much more.
• 13:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: And if I get three of that, that means my output is three better than it was three years ago.
• 13:13
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that's what's changed.
• 13:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah.
• 13:15
  Dante Reminick: And so are you guys just constantly running experiments internally and trying to poke and prod?
• 13:19
  Dante Reminick: Like, tell me about that experimentation internally.
• 13:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: So our core philosophy is that we want to own the CFO suite.
• 13:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: So what that means is you have carts, which is our core wedge, uh, then you have AP, which is payments.
• 13:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: 80% of companies use more than one product line.
• 13:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's two.
• 13:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: We just launched AR, which is invoicing, so accounts are receivable.
• 13:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and this is kind of that you know virtuous circle, right?
• 13:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: If you use us for invoicing and the funds come to us, then we have your funds because if we have your funds, we can give you more spend.
• 13:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because if you get more spend, you can do more payments.
• 13:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you get like it's that whole cycle.
• 13:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you have cards, you have AP, you have AR, then we want to add treasury, and we want to add payroll.
• 13:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then we have this concept of what we're releasing.
• 13:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's still something we're working on, which is kind of this Gee's AI services module.
• 13:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the idea is that we will be your entire CFO suite, back office, all in one in any country that you operate.
• 14:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's the goal.
• 14:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, and then it's a big goal, right?
• 14:08
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because you're gonna do this in like 30, 40, 50 countries.
• 14:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: But that's the goal.
• 14:12
  Dante Reminick: Well, I to that point, I think we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.
• 14:15
  Dante Reminick: Like, we're talking about experimenting and building out this full CFO suite filled with payments and multiple different jurisdictions, and you're acting like it's relatively easy.
• 14:24
  Dante Reminick: You're like, yeah, with AI, we can just, you know, we can go and build it, but you can't really vibe code what you're what you're talking about.
• 14:31
  Dante Reminick: Can you walk me through what it takes to build it?
• 14:34
  Dante Reminick: Like, frankly, I just want to be very, very clear with our audience that you make it sound easy, but it's not.
• 14:39
  Dante Reminick: It's very, very difficult.
• 14:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: It is not easy.
• 14:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: This is it, it's what it's it's really, really fucking hard.
• 14:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's it's uh, you know, like you have to go get the licenses, you have to build a stack.
• 14:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: So just to give you an idea, and I'll use card issue, because I think that's the clearest one to kind of explain, right?
• 14:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: So just to give the background, I don't have a fintech background, I don't have a banking background.
• 14:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I think part of the reason Jeeves is built the way it is, is because I didn't see it the same way, good or bad.
• 15:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: Candidly, we probably bit off much more than we could chew in the first go-around of this, but because we survived and because we made it to this point, it's a very defensible mode.
• 15:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because if someone else wants to do it, they have to go to 25 countries, get the licenses, get the stack.
• 15:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: But it's really because I the way we had looked at it was a little bit different.
• 15:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, what does that mean?
• 15:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: So if you look at like card issuing, right?
• 15:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's our core product that we start with.
• 15:27
  Dileep Thazhmon: It consists of four components.
• 15:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: You have the top of the funnel, KYB, customer acquisition, you have the processor, you have the program manager, which is a regulation compliance layer, and then you have the issuing bin, the bank identification number, the 16 digits Visa MasterCard, give that to you, and that's how you issue the card locally.
• 15:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: What we did that's different from day one is the first three sit on our own stack.
• 15:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: So it works across partners, et cetera, but it sits with us.
• 15:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: So what that means is when we went from Mexico to Colombia, the only thing we needed to change was that bin.
• 15:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: When we go from Colombia to Brazil, the only thing we need to change was the bin.
• 15:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: When we go to Indonesia, which we don't cover today, the only thing we need to change is that bin.
• 16:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's structurally different from how most fintechs would build it, because most fintechs are only focused on one country.
• 16:08
  Dileep Thazhmon: If you're only doing one country, why the F would you build this entire stack?
• 16:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: It makes no sense.
• 16:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's an immense amount of overhead for one country.
• 16:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so usually you go very deep in one country.
• 16:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: Three years later, you're like, let's do the next one, build it again, next one, build.
• 16:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: So ours is just fundamentally different, good or bad, but that's the core difference.
• 16:24
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like we built this very modular from day one because our goal, our thesis was that companies are going global from day one, but banking is still country and currency specific.
• 16:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: How do you solve it?
• 16:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: The core issues, the data is the data is in different silos.
• 16:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: So if you want to get the data, you have to build this abstraction layer on top.
• 16:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's our core IP.
• 16:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that that's that's the difference.
• 16:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: I don't know if that's helpful, but like that that's really what's the difference between how we're built.
• 16:48
  Dante Reminick: I think that's super helpful.
• 16:49
  Dante Reminick: I think you explained why it's so hard to build.
• 16:52
  Dante Reminick: Like there's sort of two different layers here.
• 16:54
  Dante Reminick: There's like, okay, the the financial primitives, who's my sponsor bank?
• 16:58
  Dante Reminick: What am I doing with bin numbers, et cetera, et cetera?
• 17:01
  Dante Reminick: But that's step one.
• 17:03
  Dante Reminick: Like it's a very hard step one, but it's step one.
• 17:05
  Dante Reminick: And then step two is okay, how do I create the data layer on top of it to properly serve everything that a CFO needs?
• 17:14
  Dante Reminick: AP, AR, all of that stuff.
• 17:16
  Dante Reminick: Is that is that fair?
• 17:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's fair.
• 17:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: That layer is immensely um it it it's that there's a lot of trial and error there.
• 17:24
  Dileep Thazhmon: I that there is and and this is why it's always funny when people are like, oh, you can make a 10-minute neo bank.
• 17:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: The hard part is not spitting up the neobank.
• 17:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: The hard part is the operational side of running a new bank.
• 17:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's that's what like doing payments in 190 countries, that's the skill set we've built.
• 17:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: We can do this at industrial grade.
• 17:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: Not that you can deliver the payments.
• 17:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, that you know, you can just plug into someone and they'll do it.
• 17:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the the whole sequence, like where does it start, where does it go, how does the statements work, how do you chase it down across six different providers?
• 17:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's the muscle we've built in the last you know, two, three years.
• 17:53
  Dante Reminick: It's funny though, because you're also serving companies, many of which have been around for many, many, many decades and are probably pretty ingrained in their ways of doing banking, right?
• 18:06
  Dante Reminick: Hey, they're used to sending an ACH, they're used to sending a wire and waiting seven days and dealing with massive FX fees and everything like that.
• 18:14
  Dante Reminick: But I think that also gives you an immense opportunity to go in there and really, really disrupt the current status quo with a lot of these larger companies.
• 18:22
  Dante Reminick: I talked to a lot of people that are building quote unquote neobanks or payment rails for more modern tech-focused SMBs, but for the larger enterprises that have been doing this for 100 years, the inertia is strong.
• 18:35
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it's very, very strong.
• 18:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and and also part of the value of in uh international, because really our sweet spot is international, it's not in the US, right?
• 18:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it is exactly that.
• 18:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: People forget how hard it is to send a wire in a column like in the Colombian banking ecosystem.
• 18:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: You have to actually go into the bank to send a wire.
• 18:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: So the fact that we can we have an app where you can do it in the app, people will pay for that.
• 18:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because like imagine if you're the CFO, it's like, do I go into a bank or do I do this in this app?
• 19:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then everything is there, it's all in one screen, it's the same statement.
• 19:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yes, there's a cost, but you know, there's differentiated value that's being provided.
• 19:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: I would almost compare it some in some points to the uh the banking system in the US maybe 15, 20 years ago, right?
• 19:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: Just in terms of the convenience.
• 19:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: Doesn't mean like every country has that, by the way.
• 19:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like Brazil's banking system is incredibly sophisticated.
• 19:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's actually, I'd say, better than the US, right?
• 19:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's faster, everything is instant.
• 19:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like Brazilians are always shocked.
• 19:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: Domestically, domestically.
• 19:27
  Dileep Thazhmon: Domestic.
• 19:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: When they do a payment and the last leg is the US leg, it's like, oh, it could come today, it could come tomorrow, it says 48 hours, and they're like, what does that mean?
• 19:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, why is it not instant?
• 19:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's always confusing, but that's the value internationally.
• 19:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: There is a gap.
• 19:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: There's these strong banking players that like run the entire market, but like they there's no incentive to innovate because they it's it's a pure, amazingly profitable monopoly.
• 19:50
  Dante Reminick: So yeah, that's very, very fair.
• 19:52
  Dante Reminick: But at the same time, what you are doing is serving a need that will always be a need.
• 20:00
  Dante Reminick: As in, I don't think that any business is going to come to you and say, delete.
• 20:04
  Dante Reminick: I wish my payments payments were slower.
• 20:06
  Dante Reminick: I wish I had less countries that I could do payouts in.
• 20:09
  Dante Reminick: I I wish that my card programs had more friction.
• 20:12
  Dante Reminick: Like people always are going to want better, faster, cheaper when it comes to their money.
• 20:16
  Dante Reminick: Uh and if you give them a path for that, I think that's immensely valuable.
• 20:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, I so I fully obviously agree with that.
• 20:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: I I think the harder part with enterprise is that it it is still a true enterprise sales cycle.
• 20:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: So it's a 90-day, 120-day.
• 20:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: You don't just show up and be like, hey, let's like test this out.
• 20:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's like you gotta go through the process.
• 20:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: You gotta and that's why it tends to be stickier, because once you do all that, then the bar is like, okay, is this better than what we had before?
• 20:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: And like just like you're calling out, like that bar is not super high because you're competing with you know local banks.
• 20:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um, but that cycle to get them to switch and try, that's actually really hard.
• 20:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's not it's not like SMBs because SMBs are like, oh well, let me try it.
• 20:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: Oh, 5% better.
• 20:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: You know what?
• 20:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's actually going directly to my bottom leg.
• 20:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, I'll test it out.
• 20:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's not how it works.
• 20:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: It works with like enterprises.
• 21:00
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 21:00
  Dante Reminick: And what do you think is the major sticking points for the clients that are our core G's clients, right?
• 21:07
  Dante Reminick: You can do AR, you can do AP, you can do these cards, you can do all of these different things.
• 21:11
  Dante Reminick: Are there like one or two core features where companies, when they hear your pitch, they're like that, I I want that.
• 21:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: So cards is still the opening wedge.
• 21:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: And when I say cards, the big the biggest part there is the it's not just the cards that you spend, but the controls.
• 21:27
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because at an enterprise level, the number one thing they care about is controls.
• 21:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like, can I control my employee spend?
• 21:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: If I give them a card, can it only work on an Uber and not work in this hotel or you know, for dinner?
• 21:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that's what they care about.
• 21:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's what we do very well.
• 21:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: We can do it well, we do it at scale.
• 21:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's still, I would say, the biggest opener for us because it's something that is just so structurally different from a local bank.
• 21:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's just not where they compete, that they don't care about it good or bad.
• 21:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that's not where they make their money, right?
• 21:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: For us, that's that's the core opener, which is you come to us for controls, you figure out your card spend, then what we see is usually around.
• 21:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: Month three or four, they start looking at, oh, cool, you guys also have payments.
• 22:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: You know, maybe we'll try a little bit.
• 22:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: And in the first 12 months, the revenue retention for our cohorts is almost 385%.
• 22:10
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that means if you start with $100 of revenue, at the end of the month, end of the 12-month cycle, you're looking at almost $400 of revenue, which is very, very good.
• 22:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, it just is a very sticky growing product.
• 22:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: But cards, to your question, that's still the opener, and it usually sits around controls, which is how do I know that the card spin can only be done for ABC and it can't be done for XYZ?
• 22:30
  Dante Reminick: Interesting.
• 22:31
  Dante Reminick: I I want to talk about the future a little bit.
• 22:33
  Dante Reminick: I mean, obviously, Jeeves is on a legendary tear, right?
• 22:37
  Dante Reminick: You're raising hundreds of millions of dollars, you're seeing your revenue double, triple in a very, very short amount of time.
• 22:44
  Dante Reminick: What do you spend all of your day obsessing over?
• 22:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: So many things.
• 22:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um I think I think on a structural level, the good and bad of what we do is we cover a lot of surface area and we go pretty pretty deep.
• 22:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, which is 65, 70% of our revenue, we're fully local.
• 23:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have local entities, we're getting a local banking license in Brazil to take deposits, et cetera.
• 23:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we are exposed to a lot of macro and regulatory tailwinds.
• 23:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh not tailwinds, just wins, right?
• 23:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: It could be tailwinds, it could be whether it be tailwinds or headwinds.
• 23:15
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, it's just it's wins, right?
• 23:17
  Dileep Thazhmon: And something changes, it does have an impact on our business.
• 23:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: A new, you know, election is coming.
• 23:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: There's that that has an impact.
• 23:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh that there's, you know, new resolutions that has an impact.
• 23:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: The flip side is out of all the businesses, we are actually probably most protected because we have 25 countries.
• 23:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: So if one part of one country changes, we still, it's not, you know, the majority of the business.
• 23:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's the flip side, but that's number one thing that keeps me up at night because there's just a lot of surface area like the war in the Middle East, right?
• 23:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have companies that have fuel exposure.
• 23:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: And our core product is still like a wrecks or a ramp.
• 23:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's a 30-day charge card.
• 23:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: That means for 30 days, we give you spend, and on day 31, you got to pay us back, right?
• 23:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so there's a risk for those 30 days that we have to underwrite.
• 23:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: And if you are exposed, you're an airline and you're exposed to fuel.
• 24:01
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, that's a pretty big macro risk, right?
• 24:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because your margins are now changed, right?
• 24:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, like those are the it's almost like you have to be everywhere at all the time.
• 24:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's not just small businesses, it's massive kind of enterprises with different levers that each one is working.
• 24:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, what I see at Jeeves is you either come in and you usually know in one or two weeks it either becomes like super exhausting or it's almost like a exhilarating, like you just need more because it's like, you know, it just keeps you going.
• 24:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's the first one.
• 24:27
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then the second one, I think this is the the way companies are building is also changing.
• 24:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I'm always paranoid, I'm paranoid in general, but I'm always more paranoid that like there's going to be faster companies coming in than us.
• 24:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the good thing with fintech is exactly what you said, which is even though the tech is compressing, the fin is not.
• 24:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: You still need regulation, you need you still need compliance, you cannot issue without a license.
• 24:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: Those are things that are very defensible now.
• 24:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: Almost the inverse of like four years ago where everything was the tech.
• 24:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's like, oh, fintech, fintech, fintech.
• 24:57
  Dileep Thazhmon: The tech is moving so fast.
• 24:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: The cost of development, cost of software is so low that the tech is compressing.
• 25:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the fin is one of the few industries that's regulated.
• 25:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: Each country is different.
• 25:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: You got to get a license, you've got to talk to the central bank.
• 25:09
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that, you can't AI your way out of.
• 25:12
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 25:12
  Dante Reminick: It to your point there, I we talked to a lot of people who are also going and pursuing these licenses and talking to banks and everything like that.
• 25:22
  Dante Reminick: And I think that you know when you go and you look at the market and you see all of these new banks popping up all the time, there's oftentimes a really, really big discrepancy between what people are marketing and what people actually have on the back end and what they're actually building.
• 25:36
  Dante Reminick: You know, you see a bit of these websites, and it's like, oh, global money API, and oh, we're global.
• 25:40
  Dante Reminick: And the reality is, is oftentimes it's a wrapper of a rapper of a rapper of someone who is doing the work that you guys are are going out there and doing.
• 25:49
  Dante Reminick: And I think that the people who spend the time now are absolutely going to be paying dividends on that in the future, which sort of leads me to the next thing that I want to hear about is like when you guys are thinking about the future, what are you building towards right now?
• 26:06
  Dante Reminick: Like your engineering, your product.
• 26:08
  Dante Reminick: Is this, hey, we need to just keep moving up the stack and go deeper in AR and AP?
• 26:14
  Dante Reminick: Is it okay we need to make things agentic?
• 26:16
  Dante Reminick: What are you doing with with your $100 million round?
• 26:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: So um so there's a few things.
• 26:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: One, I think independent of uh whether it's agenc or not, we need to have ownership of the infrastructure.
• 26:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's been our core philosophy since day one.
• 26:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: We rent to start, we test the market, we see which ones are accelerating, and then we want to get the infra get the license.
• 26:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like that doesn't change.
• 26:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: So independent of like what the interface is, because to me, agentic is the form of an interface, but the core rails, it doesn't change.
• 26:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's cards, it's payments, you need stripe, you need someone that can have give you that access, whether it's a human or agent.
• 26:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that is like number one.
• 26:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have to go do these modules.
• 26:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's not gonna change.
• 26:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have to get the licenses we need to operate.
• 26:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: Not every single one, you have to always like make that call, but the ones that we need to operate at the best cost that we can, like we have to get this.
• 27:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's step one.
• 27:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: So there's a whole cycle and a whole team, like that's all they're doing, right?
• 27:06
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so that's one block.
• 27:08
  Dileep Thazhmon: The second one, I strongly, strongly believe uh that it's inevitable, probably in the next two to three years, that we are going to go fully into this era of like programmable money.
• 27:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and there are two components of that.
• 27:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: You have the agent side, which is an agent that has context enough that a CFO at an enterprise will trust that agent, which is still a pretty high bar, right?
• 27:27
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because you have to understand CFOs are downside protection oriented.
• 27:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: They don't care as much about the upside, but they care a lot about the downside.
• 27:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you have to convince them that the downside is protected and then show them the upside.
• 27:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's like, okay, cool.
• 27:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: But if you can't convince them on that, you're not gonna get the first one.
• 27:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: I think that box is still open, right?
• 27:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: It starts with consumer, then you have the SMBs, then you have like it, it moves through the progression chain.
• 27:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: But the enterprise is probably the last one in the B2B cycle because they move the most, right, to get to that point.
• 27:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: So I think that's one.
• 27:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then the second one is once you do have agents that are working without a human in the loop, the main thing is you have to be able to take money and break it up into very small pieces.
• 28:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so this is where stablecoin to me comes into play.
• 28:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I think there's components here that need to be figured out because today the cost can we can we pause here, Dalip?
• 28:13
  Dante Reminick: Why is money gonna be broken up into smaller pieces?
• 28:15
  Dante Reminick: Because that's a big statement.
• 28:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, so so to me, the way I see it is agents are going to be making money decisions at a frequency that is gonna be hard to comprehend for humans.
• 28:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: You you're already seeing the outlines of this, where like I don't know which agent I have that's working now or not, but they're all they're all doing something, right?
• 28:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like they're checking a reservation, they're checking a flight.
• 28:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and that is only gonna keep increasing, which is they need access to spend, but they also need access to spend that is not necessarily in the same dollar multiples that humans operate in.
• 28:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because for them, them I use very broadly for agents, the the value of time is very different.
• 28:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: They're always on, they're always there.
• 28:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: For human, like I'm not gonna spend five hours trying to find the best deal or like so.
• 28:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: I'm like, it's almost like I have six how many transactions do you do in a day?
• 29:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: Six, maybe.
• 29:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like just in the full day, right?
• 29:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like like you buy coffee, you go to restaurants.
• 29:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, like like it's you know, it's not that many.
• 29:10
  Dileep Thazhmon: But I think an agent, at least from my thesis, is that number is gonna be 60.
• 29:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: And if you get to 60, unless your budget as a human has changed, which is not gonna change, part of it is the cost and the frequency is gonna be tied to smaller dollar value transactions.
• 29:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: And if you do smaller dollar value transactions, what we have not figured out, and we will, is how do you make the cost of that also lower?
• 29:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: Meaning the swipe for a card still has a cost, an innate cost, whether it's one cent or one dollar.
• 29:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: And at one dollar, it's priced in, like you don't really notice it.
• 29:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: But if you get to one cent and lower, the cost of the swipe is actually more expensive than the one cent.
• 29:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: So like there's there's a lot there that I like again, I don't think it's like insurmountable.
• 29:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: I just think that is not something that's been figured out.
• 29:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: But if you ask me in five years, I think even in three years, it's inevitable that that's the next frontier, which is this fully programmable money.
• 30:00
  Dileep Thazhmon: You have the agents, you have humans in loop, but the agents are doing a lot of this and they need money they can break up, and then they need context enough that they don't f it up.
• 30:08
  Dante Reminick: So just to be clear, you believe that stable coins are going to be the currency of agents, and then agents are going to need to interact with stable coins because interchange and card fees are not going to cut it.
• 30:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because uh so I believe that yes, the first one, which is the stable coins are gonna be the currency for agents.
• 30:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: And just to be clear, I don't think it has to be a USD denominated stablecoin.
• 30:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: The concept of like digitized money you can break up into very minuscule components.
• 30:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's what I think stablecoin provides.
• 30:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then the second one, the reason is that I do think part of this agent economy is the frequency is going to change.
• 30:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: I'll give you a almost like a non-agent version of this, but because we have this card product, which is a card API.
• 30:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: But if you think about an API as an MCP, MCP is an agent tick, it's it's in the same box.
• 30:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: The number of cards that companies were creating when we offered this thing, which is single use, we were talking about $100,000, $200,000, 200,000 cards a month.
• 31:01
  Dileep Thazhmon: A month.
• 31:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because it's fully single use, right?
• 31:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's how an agent thinks.
• 31:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and that's a fundamental difference from like how you and I operate, which you have one card or you know might have this card for movies, etc.
• 31:12
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's what's gonna start changing.
• 31:14
  Dante Reminick: I the mental model that I use is and there's a fierce debate, right?
• 31:19
  Dante Reminick: Are agents gonna use cards?
• 31:21
  Dante Reminick: Is that okay?
• 31:21
  Dante Reminick: Are agents gonna use stable coins?
• 31:23
  Dante Reminick: My mental model is agents are going to use cards to buy the things that humans would buy.
• 31:29
  Dante Reminick: If you want your agent to go and buy a plane ticket or a banana or a t-shirt, the agent can use a card, right?
• 31:37
  Dante Reminick: Agent fable cards, great, right?
• 31:39
  Dante Reminick: If you want your agent to go and use something that only an agent would use, compute inference, buy you know, some data, whatever it might be, stable coins are going to have to be the unit of currency specifically because of the reasons that you mentioned.
• 31:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, I I I I so one I fully agree.
• 31:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: I think the third one that I would also throw out there that combines a little bit is we are still thinking about outcomes and tasks like humans do.
• 32:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I think one of the things that will start changing is the sequence of tasks that you need to get the outcome might be different for an agent.
• 32:13
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, like as an example, when we, and this is just human nature, right?
• 32:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: We think about something, it's like five steps to get there.
• 32:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: Then you're like, okay, AI, I'm gonna use AI, and they'll help me with these two steps.
• 32:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: And you're solving for the same outcome.
• 32:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: But agents, and this is what to me is also gonna change, they might have a very different way of getting to the same outcome.
• 32:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: And I I fundamentally believe you need access to payment reels, but you also need dollar components that you can break up because how they get to the outcome might be very different from how a human is thinking is the most efficient way to get to that outcome.
• 32:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then they need the tools to be able to get to that outcome with the constraint of like solve this problem, not take these exact same six steps that I did.
• 32:49
  Dante Reminick: It's it's funny, we're talking very generically.
• 32:51
  Dante Reminick: I want to narrow it a little bit.
• 32:53
  Dante Reminick: Like you, these are your personal beliefs.
• 32:56
  Dante Reminick: How is Jeeves building for this agentic future?
• 33:00
  Dante Reminick: I mean, you know, when we talk about agents that the CFO of BMW and Lululemon and all these massive enterprises are gonna use, you guys are to, you know, to use your own words, the financial operating system, the financial operating layer.
• 33:13
  Dante Reminick: How do you build something for that?
• 33:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: I think the reality there, and it's a good, it's a good push.
• 33:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: The reality there is, so today we do have, you know, eight, eight, eight or ten agents.
• 33:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: I'll tell you the two that people use.
• 33:25
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we have one that actually um does GL coding.
• 33:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: So if you're an enterprise, there's usually a person, it's a really tedious job that they look at every transaction and then they match it to like, okay, this is Uber, this is a restaurant, etc.
• 33:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's called GL coding.
• 33:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: Um immense value because you need that to close your books.
• 33:41
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have a lot of data because we have companies that do this today for us.
• 33:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we trained an agent, it's 99.99% accurate, so better than a human.
• 33:49
  Dante Reminick: So that's something is that data spending or reconciling?
• 33:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: Reconciling.
• 33:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: This is reconciling data.
• 33:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's after the data comes back, they reconcile it.
• 33:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then the this the this uh agentic card creation.
• 34:00
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's another one that clearly is there.
• 34:01
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have six other agents that that are not being used.
• 34:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and to your point, I think part of it, and this is the reality of where we sit a little bit, is that one, internationally, the cost of human labor is actually lower, right?
• 34:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so at some point you're fighting with like, okay, yes, maybe it's a little bit better, but I already have a team, they do it well.
• 34:21
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's just one less thing I need to worry about.
• 34:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: And like, you know what, let's just continue with this for now, and then we'll come back.
• 34:26
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so the urgency of like you have to do this to agents, I I I think it's a very valid point.
• 34:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: I I don't think it's there yet at a lot of the companies that we sell to because they have their process, everybody's busy, they have 10 things to do.
• 34:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: And it's like, okay, give me the two things that work, and then I need to see real ROI.
• 34:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then the rest is like, okay, good enough, but like not really pushing the needle of what I need, and so I'm not gonna invest in that.
• 34:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: I I don't know if that's gonna change uh very quickly.
• 34:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like we we don't, you know, like we operate internationally, and it's not San Francisco, like it's not like everyone's just going out and you know, saying, like, hey, if you don't do this, the world's gonna end.
• 35:00
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's like those different origins of how that works, right?
• 35:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: So I I think it's a it's a it's a very fair pushback.
• 35:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: But but I I think that's still different from your first question, which is where you see this in three to five years.
• 35:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: I do think we're gonna get to that point.
• 35:13
  Dileep Thazhmon: But we have to build with that vision in mind.
• 35:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: I think the usage, it's it's it's a very valid point.
• 35:18
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like I think out of the six or eight agents we have, like two people actually use.
• 35:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: And then six or eight, it's there, it's interesting.
• 35:24
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's just not at the level of like, okay, I'm gonna go change my workload because of this one agent or two agents.
• 35:30
  Dante Reminick: Of course.
• 35:31
  Dante Reminick: And how much of what you do is actually in the flow of funds and moving money versus being the operating layer on top of that flow?
• 35:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh it's it's more the operating layer.
• 35:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: We we don't touch the money directly unless we have the direct license, because once you do that, then you're in the funds flow.
• 35:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh so usually we'll have we'll have partners that can handle the fund delivery in and out.
• 35:53
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh I mean in Brazil, for instance, we are getting the license at the end of the year, so that'll change.
• 35:56
  Dileep Thazhmon: Mexico, we are regulated so that we can touch, but usually you don't want to be touching the funds at any point unless you have that direct license.
• 36:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we see ours as like the orchestration layer.
• 36:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: And also, people forget about this, but it's not just the orchestration, it's it's the value of the CFO not having to do that, which is they also could do this.
• 36:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: They also could go talk to six providers, piece it all together, have like a Treasury ops team or FinOps team do it.
• 36:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's what we sell, which is you don't have to do that.
• 36:22
  Dileep Thazhmon: We'll do that for you.
• 36:27
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 36:28
  Dileep Thazhmon: 100%.
• 36:29
  Dileep Thazhmon: And what's really interesting, and this is a little bit of our secret sauce, is the companies we sell to look like Jeeps.
• 36:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: We operate in 20 countries.
• 36:36
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have 60 bank accounts.
• 36:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: Every day I get a report, it's called cash in, cash out, which we're trying to automate, but it's still so hard to automate.
• 36:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: Where someone literally goes into our 60 bank accounts, gets the actual cash that we have, puts it into a report, and sends it to me.
• 36:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: So I know at the end of the day, our entire cash in, cash out, right?
• 36:52
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's a manual, manual task.
• 36:54
  Dileep Thazhmon: And now we're building agents to be able to do that.
• 36:55
  Dileep Thazhmon: But what's good about where B sit is if our team uses it and they feel like it has value, I feel pretty confident we can sell that because the pain points we're solving is similar to what other organizations that operate in multiple countries with a sophisticated finance team will also have to solve.
• 37:12
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, it's like it's dog fooding your own product while they'll be able to do that.
• 37:16
  Dante Reminick: Which is unique, right?
• 37:17
  Dante Reminick: It's like you know, it's like I need to understand how to help CFOs that are building international finance companies.
• 37:27
  Dante Reminick: Which is and I'm gonna do that by building an international finance company.
• 37:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, by building it's and it's great because if our team uses it, then I feel pretty comfortable that we can package this and sell it.
• 37:36
  Dante Reminick: Absolutely.
• 37:37
  Dante Reminick: Absolutely.
• 37:37
  Dante Reminick: And I think you know, we we're sort of talking about the convergence of agents and and flow of funds and everything like that.
• 37:44
  Dante Reminick: But if you guys are able to develop agentic systems that are making a difference in your flows and in your back end and in your flow of funds, it's pretty easy to sell that, right?
• 37:55
  Dante Reminick: You sort of have that internal conviction on, hey, I know that this is going to bring you value because it's already done the and and this is how you use it, and here's how we use it.
• 38:05
  Dileep Thazhmon: And you know, like like all of those help.
• 38:08
  Dante Reminick: That's that's really I I imagine as a CFO and you tell me if if I'm wrong, but like that level of trust is probably a really big boost to to your sales motion.
• 38:20
  Dileep Thazhmon: Yeah, it's it's it's uh the the fact that we have the same learned experience is very helpful because we can sell it in a way that our team understands, meaning like it's useful for them.
• 38:31
  Dileep Thazhmon: I I the trust is the most important thing.
• 38:33
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's because to your point, like you we have this point of like the CFOs trust us, and now we're like, hey, try this with us.
• 38:39
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's not that other companies don't have stablecoin, it's just that they don't have the entire thing integrated in a box that the CFO already trusts in these international countries.
• 38:46
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's that's the reality, right?
• 38:47
  Dileep Thazhmon: And why do they trust it?
• 38:48
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because we have the infrastructure.
• 38:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: Why do they trust us?
• 38:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: Because they've used it for three years.
• 38:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: Like it's all these little pieces, but it comes back to the same point, which is that trust.
• 38:55
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of companies that have really, really cool tech and think that that will do all of the heavy lifting.
• 39:05
  Dante Reminick: And I think most of the industry really underestimates the value of trust still.
• 39:11
  Dileep Thazhmon: And and in Russia, and like the people around.
• 39:15
  Dante Reminick: Absolutely.
• 39:16
  Dante Reminick: I mean, but like historically speaking, you look back on the last like 5,000 years of finance, and the only through line and dictator of success is trust.
• 39:27
  Dante Reminick: That's it.
• 39:28
  Dante Reminick: And there's no reason why agents would throw that 5,000-year track record of trust away.
• 39:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it's money, right?
• 39:38
  Dileep Thazhmon: It's it's like at the end of the day, it's like it's like you know, people get paranoid and irrational about money.
• 39:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: I mean, that's just human nature.
• 39:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: It doesn't change.
• 39:45
  Dileep Thazhmon: I love it.
• 39:46
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 39:47
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 39:47
  Dante Reminick: So we started off the episode talking about your your big you know, hundred plus million dollar raise.
• 39:54
  Dante Reminick: I want to end the episode with talking about what's next post-raise.
• 39:59
  Dante Reminick: I mean, obviously, you guys are backed by the best.
• 40:02
  Dante Reminick: I know your team well, you're building with the best.
• 40:05
  Dante Reminick: What can people expect out of Jeeves?
• 40:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: So a few things.
• 40:08
  Dileep Thazhmon: So one, um we are aggressively hiring uh and and aggressively for a very small team, right?
• 40:14
  Dileep Thazhmon: So our team is still less than 200 people.
• 40:16
  Dileep Thazhmon: We operate in 35 countries, we just added 10 new ones.
• 40:19
  Dileep Thazhmon: But we are looking for more people, especially with depth on the stablecoin and crypto side.
• 40:24
  Dileep Thazhmon: So what that means is we're looking for obviously folks on the product side, we're looking for engineering talent, we're looking for sales talent.
• 40:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have a global head of partnerships role that is, I think, very exciting, which is you know, if you feel like you can do this across 35 countries, you'll have just what's unique about where we sit is we have a lot of levers.
• 40:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: We have fiat, we have stablecoin, we have infrastructure, we have licenses.
• 40:43
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you need someone that's creative to be like, oh, actually, we can mix and match this in a way that someone else hasn't done it, versus like here's a playbook that worked for XYZ.
• 40:50
  Dileep Thazhmon: Let's take this here.
• 40:51
  Dileep Thazhmon: So, one, what's going to change is we're moving into an era where we want to hire more because we want to 10x our surface area in the next year.
• 40:59
  Dileep Thazhmon: And 10x means more geographies.
• 41:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: It also means more product lines.
• 41:03
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's why we're also announcing the launch of the AR invoice suite.
• 41:07
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we started with Brazil, but we want to expand that to all the countries we're in.
• 41:10
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh and then we also, I think we're mentioned this, but we also launched uh this global AI spend tracker.
• 41:15
  Dileep Thazhmon: So our companies have this specific sequence where because they operate in six countries, they actually have AI spend in different currencies.
• 41:23
  Dileep Thazhmon: So you have your engineering team spending in pesos with quad, and then you have your customer success team spending in pounds with OpenAI.
• 41:30
  Dileep Thazhmon: And at the end of the month, you have the same question what is my spend and what is the ROI?
• 41:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: And so we built this global uh spend tracker.
• 41:37
  Dileep Thazhmon: It'll show it to you by model, it'll map it out for you.
• 41:40
  Dileep Thazhmon: That's in beta right now, but we're gonna be launching that as well.
• 41:42
  Dileep Thazhmon: So that's another area we're investing in.
• 41:44
  Dileep Thazhmon: Uh and then we're also the the big announcement is like we are expanding to 10 new countries.
• 41:49
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we've launched Argentina, uh, we're expanding into Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Central America, so that's Panama, uh, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, et cetera.
• 41:58
  Dileep Thazhmon: So this year is all Latam, and then next year we want to go into Middle East and then Southeast Asia.
• 42:02
  Dileep Thazhmon: So we see our right to win kind of in this global south.
• 42:04
  Dileep Thazhmon: So a lot to come.
• 42:06
  Dante Reminick: Fantastic.
• 42:07
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 42:08
  Dante Reminick: And and I'm I'm gonna be following along with that journey.
• 42:11
  Dante Reminick: I hope that our audience does as well.
• 42:13
  Dante Reminick: Dalip, thank you.
• 42:14
  Dante Reminick: Thank you so much for jumping on, for sharing your wisdom.
• 42:17
  Dante Reminick: You and I have about 10 more hours of questions to cover.
• 42:21
  Dante Reminick: Uh, but for the sake of the sanity of our audience, like I said, I appreciate you coming.
• 42:25
  Dante Reminick: For our audience, I hope that you were able to learn a lot.
• 42:28
  Dante Reminick: I know that I did.
• 42:29
  Dante Reminick: Uh, and Delete, we're gonna have to have you back on the show.
• 42:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: I love it.
• 42:32
  Dileep Thazhmon: I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.
• 42:34
  Dileep Thazhmon: Thanks for having me on.