The business day used to matter. Businesses were open Monday through Friday, and occasionally on weekends. You went to work, often literally from 9 to 5, and then left for the rest of your day.
Business was static. It started; it stopped.
The internet changed that. Amazon transformed your local bookstore from a physical shop with business hours to an always-open global storefront for every imaginable product. Slack, mobile phones, and Zoom transformed the commute and the business day into relics of the past. Stripe turned starting a business and accepting payments from a complex legal process into a simple API. You can now start a business with just a credit card and an internet connection. Consumer fintech products like PayPal made payments feel faster and new investing platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood made it easier for customers to participate in economic growth.
Through all the positive changes that the internet has brought to business in the last 30 years, banking is more or less the same. Your bank still opens and closes. Money still moves at the speed of ACH and wire transfers. Some of the most essential financial services aren’t available on weekends, despite the global economy moving faster than ever before. Finance is stuck in the past.
While fintech changed the front end and UX of financial services, banking remains the bottleneck on the back end. Most fintech products are built on the same small group of sponsor banks, many of which run on outdated systems and processes. These banks do their best to accommodate the demands placed on them, but they struggle to provide the programmability and feature set that modern consumers and businesses expect from their software.
We need a bank that’s always on, always open, always available. A bank that never closes. A continuous bank.
Banks are slow and static — keeping limited hours — for a reason. They run on much the same atrophying technology stack that they did before the internet changed our world. Banks are fundamentally ledgers, and the internet gave us a better kind of ledger. The internet gave us blockchains.
We need a bank built like a blockchain, the financial infrastructure with the strongest resilience, uptime, and accessibility on the planet. We need a bank with instant settlement and support for atomic transactions.
We also need a bank with the experience, compliance, and security to stand the test of time.
OpenReserve is building this bank: the bank for the internet age. Traditional banks create credit, but cannot operate natively onchain. Stablecoins move money continuously, but do not create credit. OpenReserve combines continuous money with regulated credit.
Venture capital hasn’t historically focused on banks. The VC model typically relies on technology to increase productivity growth and drive outlier returns. Historically, banking was not driven by technological innovation. We believe that’s changed. Stablecoins are better money, and can enable faster, cheaper, and more transparent money movement. We also believe there is greater operating leverage in banking today due to blockchains as more efficient infrastructure and AI agents as faster and lower cost intelligence. Bankers should be forward deployed, spending time with their customers instead of buried in excel or even literal paperwork for processes that are better automated in software.
While stablecoins can solve money movement, they don’t address credit. Part of the reason we believe OpenReserve is purpose-fit to improve banking is its combination of deep lending expertise, customer empathy, and knowledge of onchain finance. We are excited about the potential to launch new onchain vaults backed by the guarantees only a federally chartered U.S. bank can make. We’re also excited about a bank core built like an L1, and the potential for developers to build new protocols and products on top of OpenReserve in the same way Ethereum and Solana served as a substrate for onchain finance.
It isn’t easy to start a new bank. After the great financial crisis the number of de novo bank charters plummeted, and has only recently begun to increase. We believe Americans and companies worldwide will benefit from more banking options, and the technological progress that new banks like OpenReserve represent.
OpenReserve is a bank powered by a programmable core ledger. It is designed for the continuous settlement that tokenized deposits and stablecoins make possible. Continuous settlement means both always being open, and the support for instant money movement. OpenReserve represents a regulated balance sheet capable of creating and distributing credit onchain. And it’s run by an experienced team who have run financial services at scale.
OpenReserve was founded by Dee Choubey. Dee immigrated to America from India as a small child, his ascension up the ranks of traditional finance culminated when he founded his first company MoneyLion in 2012. He took MoneyLion public and ultimately sold it to Gen Digital (formerly Symantec) in 2025. Dee has a rare combination of true depth in financial services and the technological expertise to change the future of finance. He is an experienced leader and lender. He innovated first in consumer lending based on alternative data and then scaled the operation to lend billions in total during his time leading MoneyLion. Dee is joined by Rick Correia, who held group COO roles at both Merill Lynch and Citadel before working with Dee at MoneyLion for almost a decade.
When I first met Dee through my friend and fellow a16z General Partner, David Haber, it was immediately clear he was inherently motivated to succeed. Our partner Alex Rampell will sometimes talk about investing in a “Count of Monte Cristo,” or a second time founder who got close to their ultimate goal, and had strong success, but ultimately had greater ambitions.
We believe Dee’s second act could eclipse his first, but it has also become clear Dee is inspired by more than personal success. At MoneyLion most of their customers were households with $50-150,000 in annual income, and 95% of investment accounts were first time investors. OpenReserve represents not just a more accessible financial system, but a chance to make core services like banking and lending more efficient for all customers.
We are proud to partner with Dee, Rick, and the entire OpenReserve team, and to lead their $25M seed round.
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