Hey, I’m Balazs!
I’m a builder.

I built five banks & fintechs, two crypto exchanges, three brokerage platforms, two L1 blockchains, a perpetual futures exchange and a couple of SaaS endeavors. I love to build. My story started after dropping out of my CS undergrad at 18 to build in fintech. With my first company, Herdius, I wanted to revolutionize how cross-chain assets move in the digital money space — we raised $7m and ultimately after many pivots ended up shutting down.

Pile followed thereafter as a second tour ($3m raised from absolutely awesome people!) to build better fintech and banking rails. We coined the term crypto-as-a-service and proceeded to build out a crypto as an API provider across Europe. Due to Luna and FTX we pivoted to treasury management and built a B2B fintech as such that ended up being acquired by fintech unicorn Vivid.

After spending most time in Europe, I wanted to experience building in the US. I joined Crescent ($xxM raised) as a CTO. Had a hand in building a best in class US B2B neobank competitor and caught up with incumbents while having significantly less resources. During my tenure we 100x’d revenue, growth across all verticals, managed hundreds of millions in AuM and $Bn in payment volume across rails.

Journey so far

  1. Eng · Stealth

  2. CTO · Crescent

    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 started off as the right hand man for the ex Head of Growth @ Ramp. I took over after a few months as CTO overseeing everything related to tech & product.

  3. CTO in Residence · Techstars

    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.

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

    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.

  5. Founder · Herdius (Series A)

    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.