A 25-year-old just raised $180M to build a US bank from scratch

Augustus has raised $180 million at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the round, the company announced on Tuesday. Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle and Deel joined in. The startup has now raised $210 million in total.

A bank, built from scratch

Augustus wants to be what it calls the Global Dollar Bank. The idea is to give banks and fintechs abroad direct access to US dollar accounts and payment rails. Today they mostly reach the dollar through chains of middlemen, a slow and creaky layer known as correspondent banking.

“The Dollar is the greatest product in the world, but its distribution is fundamentally broken,” said chief executive Ferdinand Dabitz. His fix is to build a real bank rather than sit on top of someone else’s. Its target customers are institutions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where dollar access is hardest.

The 25-year-old banker

Dabitz is the story here. He is a 25-year-old German Thiel Fellow who started the company in 2022 as a payments firm called Ivy. In May, Augustus won conditional approval for a US national bank charter, only the eighth granted since 2010. If final sign-off lands, Dabitz becomes the youngest head of a federally chartered US bank in more than a century, by TechFundingNews’s reckoning.

He is not doing it alone. His president is Greg Quarles, a three-decade banker who spent years inside the regulator that hands out these charters. “You don’t get meaningful innovation by patching legacy infrastructure. You build something new from the foundation up,” Quarles said.

That pairing is deliberate. As QED’s Nigel Morris, a co-founder of Capital One, put it, correspondent banking is “the last remaining part of the bank stack that hasn’t been challenged yet by fintechs.”

Where the stablecoins fit

This is where crypto enters, but only as plumbing. Customers can move money over Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoins. Augustus will not issue a coin of its own, Dabitz told CoinDesk. Its core platform, Marble, uses AI in the back office to settle around the clock rather than on bankers’ hours.

Dabitz thinks that mix is the future. He expects every clearing bank to offer stablecoin rails within a decade, much as they offer Fedwire today. He also ties it to automation: if AI agents are to handle money, he argues, they will need programmable money to handle.

The firm already clears euros through a regulated entity in Finland, and counts the crypto exchange Kraken as a customer.

A billion-dollar bet

The valuation is a wager, not a done deal. The OCC approval is conditional, so Augustus cannot yet run as a chartered bank. Final clearance is expected later this year, as regulators everywhere tighten the rules around digital money and cross-border payments.

Building a bank from nothing is also hard and slow. Column, the infrastructure bank from a Plaid co-founder, took years to scale even with a charter already in hand. The $180 million says its backers expect Augustus to get there.