From Crypto To T-Bills: Inside Meow’s Hard Pivot

With just 15 employees, these 29-year-old founders are creating a financial supermarket for startups and small businesses.

By Emily Mason and Jeff Kauflin

In June 2022, five months before cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, Brandon Arvanaghi and Bryce Crawford began returning funds to the customers of Meow, the neobank they had launched to help startups and small businesses earn a return on idle corporate cash through crypto.

It was both a prudent and gutsy decision. Prudent, because after the collapse of stablecoin TerraUSD in mid-May of 2022, they began hearing rumors that crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital would go bankrupt — which it soon did, eventually bringing a bundle of connected firms down. Gutsy, because just weeks before, they had closed a $22 million series A fundraising round from investors including Tiger Global, QED and yes, FTX itself. That money had been raised to support a platform Arvanaghi and Crawford had built allowing startups and small businesses to use their spare cash to earn yield by lending money to institutional crypto operations that themselves did lending and trading.