Augustus has raised $180 million at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global led the round, the company announced on Tuesday. Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle and Deel joined in. The startup has now raised $210 million in total.
Augustus wants to be what it calls the Global Dollar Bank. The idea is to give banks and fintechs abroad direct access to US dollar accounts and payment rails. Today they mostly reach the dollar through chains of middlemen, a slow and creaky layer known as correspondent banking.
“The Dollar is the greatest product in the world, but its distribution is fundamentally broken,” said chief executive Ferdinand Dabitz. His fix is to build a real bank rather than sit on top of someone else’s. Its target customers are institutions in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where dollar access is hardest.
The 25-year-old banker
Dabitz is the story here. He is a 25-year-old German Thiel Fellow who started the company in 2022 as a payments firm called Ivy. In May, Augustus won conditional approval for a US national bank charter, only the eighth granted since 2010. If final sign-off lands, Dabitz becomes the youngest head of a federally chartered US bank in more than a century, by TechFundingNews’s reckoning.
