Alexandre Roubaud's Bitstack app rounds up your everyday purchases and invests the spare change in Bitcoin. The startup has 40,000 monthly active users, €8.6 million in Bitcoin savings per month, and €200,000 in monthly revenue. It's fully regulated in France and aims to become Europe's Bitcoin-native bank.
Chapters
We're generating out of that over €200,000 in monthly revenue, and we're growing 10% month over month. I wish I could share more details with them, but there's something very exciting that we'll announce very soon. We have our first partner who's one of the largest financial institutions in France. So I wish I could tell them more about that, but I guess they'll have to wait for the news to come out.
Is your endgame to be acquired by someone like Revolut or become someone like Revolut, assuming they can offer the same capabilities?
We'll beat Revolut. We'll beat Revolut because our thesis is that digital assets are going to be in the core or the future of the banking experience, and we just Uniquely positioned to build that Bitcoin-native bank.
Why do you care?
My name is Alexandre Roubaud. I'm one of the 2 co-founders of Bitstack and CEO. Originally, I'm from the south of France, so small town. After my diploma, I moved to McGill in Montreal, Canada, where I spent actually 8 years and where I met my now co-founder, Kabir. I was in business school, he was in engineering school, and we actually met because we both had this common interest for Bitcoin. Not so clear we were going to start a company.
Together.
I spent 2 years leading product for Canada's fastest-growing saving and investing app, helped them scale to hundreds of thousands of users. Saving is the first step in your personal finance journey. You need to put money aside to be able to finance any goal that you have— saving for a house, traveling, investing. But then not everyone has the financial knowledge or financial literacy to take their finances into their own hands. How can we leverage an everyday habit that people know how to do to then help them save? And that's when I pitched Kabir to start a new company together, and we moved back to France. Running a company, you kind of have to learn to manage your emotions because you're on this constant roller coaster of, we're doing great, this is going to go very far, to, oh, now the challenges are very hard. This might not go anywhere, and it can be very draining personally if you don't know how to manage these emotions. The key solution is to have a very strong co-founder so that you can kind of lay your head on their shoulders. We know what we're doing has an impact. My co-founder and I have been doing customer support ourselves for almost the first full year of running the company. So we were chatting with our users every day. Money is an important topic, and we know we've been helpful.
If you were to win this competition, who would get the most excited?
Who would call you right away?
Other than my mom, I would hope, and I think the team would be super proud. We're all very proud of what we accomplished together.
Coming up on Meet the Drapers.
I think you missed the question.
Now, couldn't Acorn just do this?
What stops somebody else from doing exactly what you're doing?
So this year we were very lucky to host Paris Blockchain Week in the Musée du Louvre. Super excited to be welcoming in France all the companies worldwide that are building for Bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain. People were very amazed by all the architecture that's around, but also in the Musée du Louvre. Just walking around and just taking all this beautiful scenery in. There's obviously all the classics from the Eiffel Tower, the Musée du Louvre, but one thing that my friends and I do enjoy is just sitting next to the Seine that's flowing throughout Paris. You can actually watch the sunsets, and so I highly recommend doing that. In France, and especially in Paris, we have this terrace vibe where people go on terraces, eat some food, and grab a drink. That's what we all do after work to disconnect. And then during the weekends, we like to just walk around the city. If it's a beautiful day, just walk along the river. Walking around and just taking all this scenery that we have here. There's definitely a lot of work to do, so not as much free time as I'd like to, but I do get to enjoy very nice restaurants and bars as well. Eating well and walking around with some very nice architecture. You're always a bit nervous before you pitch, especially when the crowd is big, but the vibe from the audience was For many years, I've tried to convince my friends and family to buy Bitcoin, but they didn't know how or where to do it, or even just how much money to invest. So we've built Bitstack, the first mobile app that allows anyone to save and invest in Bitcoin effortlessly. So how does it work? You can link any European bank account to the app, and Bitstack will automatically round up your everyday purchases and invest the spare change in Bitcoin. If you buy a coffee for €2.60, Bitstack will round it up to €3 and invest the €0.40 difference in Bitcoin. It's just a set-it-and-forget-it solution. So now anyone can simply invest in Bitcoin regardless of their financial literacy or technical know-how. And as a result, over 50% of our users are first-time crypto investors. Didn't really know what to expect. So when Tim like cut me off and—
Do the buyers who leave their change in And you put it into Satoshis. Do they have any sense of how they can spend it, save it? What are they generally doing with it?
I thought I was going to be delivering the whole pitch, but he jumped right into the questions. But I've pitched many times before. Got to draw a lot from that experience. That's how users get started. But already today in the app, they can also buy one-time Bitcoin. They can sell Bitcoin. They can send Bitcoin to any other external wallets.
I think you missed the question. People who are not acquainted to cryptos. How do they retrieve the returns? They still have to get exposed to the crypto literacy.
Yeah. So because of the position we have, obviously we've built a lot of content on like, what is Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin's value prop? We've become the number one YouTube channel in France on building that educational content on Bitcoin. We're the number one on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify.
How do you get paid?
So we charge 1.49% every time you buy or sell Bitcoin, and that fee decreases over time as you trade more volume on the platform.
Now, couldn't Acorn just do this? They're doing that same thing. They're correct. They're taking people's change and putting it away for a rainy day.
Yeah.
What stops somebody else from doing exactly what you're doing? The same salami technique, rounding up.
So here's the deal. In Europe, it's a very regulated market. So we're actually one of the first few companies that are fully regulated here in France with the equivalent of the SEC. So the Financial Markets Authority, we've become the leader in less than 2 years in France. We're on track to be the leader in Europe over the next 2 years, and then we'll go for global expansion after that. To give you a few numbers, in less than 2 years, we already reached over 40,000 monthly active users, collectively saving over €8.6 million in Bitcoin every month. We're generating out of that over €200,000 in monthly revenue, and we're growing 10% month over month. I wish I could share more details with them, but there's something very exciting that we'll announce very soon. We have our first partner who's one of the largest financial institutions in France. So I wish I could tell them more about that, but I guess they'll have to wait for the news to come out.
Is your endgame to be acquired by someone like Revolut or become someone like Revolut, assuming they can offer the same thing?
We'll beat Revolut. We'll beat Revolut because our thesis is that digital assets are going to be in the core or the future of the banking experience. And we're just uniquely positioned to build that Bitcoin-native bank.
Why do you care?
Why do I care?
Yeah, why do you care? Why does this matter?
Some people say fix the money, fix the world, and so if we can help that, that's our job. I connected personally great with Tim. I know Tim is a big fan of Bitcoin and he understands how Bitcoin is a force for good.
Well, Alex, thanks so much for being on Meet the Drapers.
My pleasure.
Great to see you.
Feeling good, exciting, obviously nervous, some adrenaline, but but always super pumped to be able to share our story.
Yeah, so I like the fact that he's got a big ambition, wants to take on the likes of Revolut, but I do feel like it's got a limited scope geographically, barriers to entry are low. Ambition's good, business model, not quite convinced.
I might slightly disagree, slightly and politely. If you're able to fix something for just a small geography, but you do it right, you're still more successful than those who have a global purview. But at the same time, I do agree that the business model can get better. Ambitions for sure work out.
Hey, audience, what did you guys think of this? Alex, good guy, right? Yeah, okay.
