Variant

Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Hello Clever. Hello Clever is building a global payments layer that lets merchants accept local payment methods across geographies through a single integration. We believe the rise of real-time payment networks (RTPs) creates a massive opportunity for this business that incumbents are not positioned to capitalize on. While they don’t get nearly as much spotlight as stablecoins, RTPs are exploding in popularity.

Variant invests in technology that expands autonomy—giving users more agency through increased access, knowledge, and ownership. Access to knowledge has always been a bottleneck to progress, particularly in specialized domains, because it stays with the rare individuals who hold it. The handful of researchers who can answer hard technical questions remain siloed and inaccessible to most people and businesses.

Agents are becoming a much more ingrained part of how we do work. They expand the capabilities, capacity, and agency of each person within an organization. Many AI tools today focus on how to augment human workflows; we’re excited about much more work shifting toward agents that automate workloads, especially as domain-specific models lead to novel frontiers.

“We have identified industrial-scale campaigns by three AI laboratories—DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax—to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities to improve their own models.” This is how Anthropic opens its report on “distillation attacks” by Chinese labs. Anthropic goes on: “[D]istillation can . . .

The bear market has been tough for crypto. Capital and attention have left, largely for good reasons. Nonetheless, I remain excited about the opportunities ahead. While I have a handful of less crystallized or more speculative theses about crypto’s comeback, I thought I’d share one that’s a bit more formed. And while not much is new in this post, the particular framing has helped anchor my conviction throughout the bear.

The first wave of AI companies largely focused on augmenting workflows. Many have been among the most successful enterprise SaaS businesses in history. In 2026, model capabilities hit a tipping point, allowing startups to take a new approach. Rather than sell to incumbents, this second wave aims to disrupt them through automation. Many of these businesses do not look like SaaS, but software-as-the-service. This dynamic of augmentation vs.

Variant has led the seed round in Tenor Finance. Tenor gives asset managers and borrowers access to fixed-rate lending markets onchain. Built on Midnight, the fixed-rate primitive Morpho announced yesterday. We co-led Morpho’s seed in 2022 on the belief that *minimal* lending primitives could become infrastructure underpinning onchain finance integrations.

We’re excited to announce our investment in Augustus. Augustus is building the Global Dollar Bank: a full-service US national bank chartered to provide better, direct dollar access to global fintechs and banks. In May, the OCC granted Augustus conditional approval to establish its national bank. This charter lets customers hold and move both stablecoins and traditional dollars from a single account, through a single banking relationship.

“In this Grand Alliance, the combined R&D spending of TSMC and its ten biggest customers exceeds that of Samsung and Intel together.” – Morris Chang, Founder of TSMC Morris Chang was long obsessed with the idea of creating a dedicated chip foundry. Up until the 1990s, chip design and manufacturing were bundled together. Innovation was stifled as a result: manufacture and design are entirely different skill sets.

Variant invests in technology that expands autonomy — a person or organization’s freedom to build, customize, and act on their own terms. Automation helps developers, individuals, and organizations do more with less. Done right, it increases agency for those at the helm by giving the user both new capabilities and greater ownership over their stack. Such surface area is (rightfully) quite broad.