Hey, I'm Balazs! A founder based between SF & Berlin.

After dropping out of my CS undergrad after two months I moved to Berlin where I founded two VC backed fintechs Herdius (series A) & Pile (acquired by Vivid).

Throughout my journey I have built from the ground up four banks across Europe and the US (B2B & B2C), two brokerage platforms, credit cards and a dozen B2B SaaS apps that never saw the light of day.

Platforms that I built have managed over $400m in AuM, $1.5b in TPV across hundreds of customers.

Currently building something absolutely awesome in fintech. Reach out if I can ever be helpful!

Journey so far

Head of Engineering (CTO) - Crescent

2024 - Now

After years of building in Berlin, I wanted to experience how building & competing in San Francisco feels like. Let me tell you, it's on another level to Europe.

Initially starting off as the right hand man for the ex Head of Growth @ Ramp (I wanted to learn proper growth). I took over after a few months as CTO overseeing everything tech and product related.

CTO in Residence - Techstars

2024

I always loved helping startups to succeed and not make the same mistakes I did. I had the chance to be one three internal executives in residence for the Berlin cohort to help guide 12 teams across early tech, product & growth decisions.

I always loved helping startups to succeed and not make the same mistakes I did.

I had the chance to be one three internal executives in residence for the Berlin cohort to help guide 12 teams across early tech, product & growth decisions.

Co-Founder - Pile Capital (acq. Vivid Money)

Co-Founder - Pile Capital
(acq. Vivid Money)

2017 - 2023

My co-founder and I were fed up with the way banking as a service worked at the time. It felt like the whole fintech industry was built on ancient payment rails that are hard to use, don't scale and are stuck in the past. Pile was our answer!

We raised a $3m pre-seed round to build better payment infra for other fintechs, so that they can get up to speed with crypto easily. We coined (actually) the term crypto as a service and starting building out our APIs to offer wallets, trading as well as on/off ramps. Luna & FTX happened and everything changed. Everyone in our pipeline just evaporated overnight. Nobody wanted to touch crypto.

We decided to pivot back to more traditional fintech to do treasury management & a high yield business account for startups scaling that to a decent AuM and customer base. In the end Pile was acquired by Vivid Money.

Founder - Herdius (Series A)

2017 - 2021

I believed crypto to be the future of finance so I started Herdius with the idea to build a cross chain DEX. These days you had only a couple of decentralized exchanges that were pursuing the same goal (e.g 0x) as we are still way before the Uniswap days.

We never really found our footing as DEXs were not going anywhere. Following a pivot to build an interoperability layer across chains, pre Polkadot era, that was also too early. In the end we did our final bet of building a B2B2C neobank on top of Weavr that was half crypto, half fiat. Unfortunately after $7m raised we just ran out runway, in the end if we would have stuck to either of the first two tracks we might have won. A painful (but good!) lesson learned and first chip on the shoulder.

Unfortunately after $7m raised we just ran out runway, in the end if we would have stuck to either of the first two tracks we might have won. A painful (but good!) lesson learned and first chip on the shoulder.