If you still think Bitcoin is just a speculative play for crypto bros in hoodies or corporate whales stacking sats on some backdoor balance sheet, you’re missing the plot. Castle just raised a $1M pre-seed round to make sure you don’t miss the next act.
Castle isn’t about hype. It’s not promising to build a token or drop a white paper. What Stephen Cole and João Almeida are building is way more subversive than that, it’s infrastructure. Boring to the average observer. But to anyone who’s actually run a P&L or lost sleep over inflation-devoured savings, it’s a signal through the noise.
Let’s get it straight: Castle is a bitcoin treasury platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Not hedge funds. Not FAANG execs playing armchair macro. This is for the restaurants, the gyms, the accounting firms, the indie SaaS shops, Main Street businesses trying to keep their heads above water while the Fed keeps the inflation tap slightly cracked open. Castle automates bitcoin allocations, integrates with your existing stack (QuickBooks, PayPal, Square, Stripe), and disappears into the background like every good piece of financial tech should.
Stephen Cole isn’t some fly-by-night founder. He’s an angel investor in 70+ early-stage startups, with stints at Goldman Sachs and Bridgewater on the resume. If there’s a guy who understands both the volatility of Wall Street and the quiet consistency SMBs crave, it’s him. João Almeida isn’t just writing code, he’s a technical surgeon. The man built OpenNode, then Orqestra. Now he’s tuning Castle like a Formula 1 pit crew chief. Precision, reliability, zero fluff.
This $1M round? Led by Brayton Williams at Boost VC, with backup from Winklevoss Capital, Park Rangers Capital, Epoch VC, and a crew of sharp angel investors. They didn’t throw chips at Castle for fun. They saw something obvious: nearly a third of U.S. SMBs already accept crypto. But how many know what to do with it once it hits the balance sheet? That’s the hole Castle fills.
No monthly fees. Free signups. Risk-adjusted strategies from conservative to cowboy. Threshold triggers. Revenue-based allocations. The stack is tailored for real businesses with real needs. It’s treasury ops for people who don’t have the luxury of hiring a CFO squad, and it’s invisible by design.
The American SMB sector is sitting on trillions in cash and near-cash assets… while Bitcoin continues to outpace traditional savings. Castle isn’t just helping them survive inflation, it’s giving them a compass in a monetary fog.
