Over the past decade, the neobank movement has transformed how individuals and businesses interact with their finances. Yet most neobanks have stayed firmly in the fiat world, layering modern UX on top of legacy infrastructure. At the same time, crypto-native financial platforms have thrived on flexibility and composability but often struggled with regulatory clarity, trust, and institutional-grade risk management.

The result? A fragmented landscape: one side trusted but rigid, the other innovative but unregulated. Pave Bank sits precisely at the intersection of these two worlds. It combines the regulatory foundation and trust of a licensed bank with the flexibility and automation of digital assets. The result is a multi-asset banking platform where institutional clients can hold, transact, and program across both fiat and tokenized assets within a single environment. A one-stop shop for fiat and crypto needs, one might call it. 

Pave Bank is a new kind of financial institution, a full-reserve, programmable bank designed for the on-chain era. Headquartered in Singapore and licensed in Georgia, Pave was founded on the belief that traditional and digital asset banking are converging. As money, assets, and financial products become programmable, the very architecture of banking must evolve to reflect this shift. And Pave is building the infrastructure to make that possible.

Our investment in Pave Bank

Unlike most digital banks, Pave built its core banking infrastructure entirely in-house. This decision gives the team full control over product velocity, integrations, and security.

The platform supports accounts across 25+ fiat currencies and stablecoins, and offers corporate treasury products (like US T-bills and MMFs), digital asset exchange, segregated digital asset wallets, FX exchange, treasury management, and 24/7 internal transfers via PaveNet, the bank’s proprietary settlement network. On top of this, its programmable banking API allows customers to automate financial workflows, integrate smart contracts and AI-enhanced decision-making, and design bespoke treasury and payment operations. That’s a hefty set of capabilities that has historically been less associated with regulated banking.

The rise of programmable banking

Wintermute Ventures is particularly excited about the programmable banking layer Pave is developing. As programmable assets and tokenized deposits gain adoption, the ability to integrate automated, on-chain, and off-chain actions into daily banking operations will reshape corporate finance.

We envision a world where businesses can build financial logic directly into their accounts, from automated settlements to on-chain treasury strategies, all under a regulated banking umbrella.

Pave shares this vision and their roadmap reflects it. Having its proprietary core banking platform in place, the next stage focuses on expanding treasury and credit products. Later phases will open the platform to a wider range of participants and include support for tokenized assets, ultimately creating a composable, programmable banking ecosystem.

We see this as a blueprint for the future: a bank-as-infrastructure model, where programmability unlocks composability between financial products, counterparties, and ecosystems. As regulations for on-chain assets mature globally, programmable banks like Pave are uniquely positioned to bridge compliance, trust, and innovation in one stack.

Licensing advantage and strategy

One of Pave Bank’s distinct differentiators is its fully regulated banking license, which allows it to operate with the trust and flexibility that institutional clients demand. Unlike most digital asset platforms that rely on sponsor banks or intermediaries, Pave controls its own infrastructure, enabling it to hold deposits, process payments, originate credit, and offer investment products directly under its charter.

A licensed, full-reserve structure not only enhances transparency and client confidence but also expands Pave’s addressable market. It bridges the credibility of traditional banking with the innovation of programmable finance, allowing Pave to compete on both compliance and technology.

Operating under a Georgian banking license, Pave’s licensing model combines operational reach with regulatory prudence, avoiding many of the dependencies and risks that constrain non-bank entities.

Pave’s forward-looking strategy is designed to scale this foundation globally. The bank is expanding across key jurisdictions, adding depth to its regulatory footprint and resilience to its operations, ensuring long-term scalability across regions in both traditional and digital markets.

For Wintermute Ventures, this licensing architecture reinforces our core thesis: the future of finance belongs to institutions that combine compliance-grade trust with programmable innovation. Pave’s regulatory position gives it a defensible moat, and the structural freedom to lead as programmable banking becomes mainstream.

Early traction and trust

Pave’s traction has been exceptional. Since opening its doors at the end of 2023, the bank has grown from zero to over 400 corporate and institutional clients, processing more than $5 billion in transaction volume, and with revenues having grown eightfold just this year. Pave’s full-reserve model, where all deposits are held 1:1, adds another layer of trust, which is a crucial differentiator at a time when transparency and capital integrity are paramount.

Our relationship with Salim and Pave goes back. We took our time to understand the business and chose not to invest initially. Since then, we’ve seen how Salim and the team continued to execute with focus and persistence, and we heard consistently strong feedback from customers during this due diligence. That tenacity is something we deeply value in founders, and it reinforced our conviction to back Pave now.

The convergence of finance and blockchain

At Wintermute Ventures, we have long believed that the convergence of traditional and on-chain finance will define the next decade of market infrastructure. Institutions will not move fully on-chain overnight, but they will increasingly demand programmable access to liquidity, risk management, and settlement tools that operate across both systems.

Pave Bank embodies that thesis. It’s the connective tissue between legacy finance and the blockchain-native world, and the start of an exciting journey for Wintermute Ventures as both an investor and a believer in the programmable future of money.