On The Brink with Castle Island - Brandon Arvanaghi (Meow) on Banking AI Agents (EP.715)

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Brandon Arvanaghi, the co-founder and CEO of Meow, joins the show. In this episode we discuss: The rise of agentic payments and the convergence of LLMs and financial services. Meow's approach to banking the agentic economy. How financial services firms and banks will need to evolve in order to service AI agents. Meow's product roadmap. Meow recently made history as the first fintech to enable AI agents to open business bank accounts and virtual cards. Meow has been building the banking and treasury infrastructure for crypto-native and VC-backed companies for several years now. This includes USDC/USDT rails, stablecoin card programs, treasury management, and FX. To learn more about Meow visit meow.com  

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Brandon Arvinahi, the co-founder and CEO of Meow, a Castle Island portfolio company. Meow is a financial technology company that provides a suite of products for businesses, and that includes business checking accounts, stable coin accounts, and global treasury solutions. This week, the company announced the launch of a new product, bank accounts for AI agents. In this conversation, we discussed the convergence of AI and financial market infrastructure and what Meow is seeing in this fast-growing part of the market.

I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Brandon from Meow. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Brandon, welcome back to the podcast. A lot has changed since the last time you're on, huh? A lot has changed. So I feel like you guys have five or six new products probably since the last time you're on. Could you just set the lay of the land in terms of what does Meow look like today?

Yeah, it's interesting because they all seem like new products from the outside. But when you peek under the hood, this is all the same thing. So what we just launched were the first Fintech to offer bank accounts for AI agents. the first fintech in history. This is a moment just like back in the day where people thought it was crazy to open a bank account from their mobile phone. That was unheard of.

It was like, I could just walk to the branch next door. Who needs this? Oh, it might be unsafe to do it for my phone. We became the first to allow an AI agent. So your favorite LLF, be it Claude, Gemini, chat GPT, to open an actual bank account for you. Now, that is opening up a ton of doors.

I think the vibe coders, the indie hackers, et cetera. They want no friction. They want to be able to spin up a business, open a bank account, accept payments, all in one prompts. We're at the forefront of that. So the entire app were rethinking from an agent first perspective. So it's not that anything's new on the app, but it's just this is the logical conclusion

of what finance looks like, and we're just trying to get there first. It's pretty incredible. When you started Meow, AI was a word, but we didn't have LLMs. The whole industry has evolved. What's it been like to just operate a startup in this environment? You can go so much faster than you could before. It's crazy, too, because I'm not going to name name. So there were some AI companies that came out with AI coders, et cetera, first,

and they all were terrible. We were early adopters to them. It was just spaghetti code, terrible, et cetera. Then there was like an inflection point. I think it was with one of the Claude models where it started getting good. It went from bad to good overnight. And that's when things really opened up. So we've invested a lot in our infrastructure to make it AI-friendly,

basically allowing code to be written, codes to be reviewed, If there's an alert, it's automatically triaged, and PR is submitted for it, end-to-end test it. It's absolutely banana bills. Our engineers are not really writing code by hand as much anymore, if at all. They're reviewing code by hand. They have agents to help them, but it's just crazy what's happened in the past year and a half. It's really interesting, and I'll probably stumble over this in terms of the use cases. A startup or a company comes on board your platform, they have a general corporate account, right?

But you wouldn't want the corporate account permissioned onto these agents for obvious reasons. you wouldn't want your agents to have access to the full bank account. Am I thinking about that the right way that the reason you would want your agent to have an account is so that you can dynamically permission it, give it access to certain amounts of capital, put a human in a loop potentially for large balance transactions? Yeah, you can configure it however you want. It's exactly right. I would say, what's the logical conclusion, though?

The logical conclusion is people are not going to be logging into meow.com. They're not going to be logging into brex.com. They're going to have their AI personal assistant, the same one that does the hair appointment for them, the nail appointment, get their partner a gift. It'll also say, hey, you received a bill, by the way, for this much in your email. They applied the 20% discount, they promise. You haven't paid them yet, and it's due in 10 days, so I've already scheduled it. It'll be out in 10 days.

So honestly, Asians are going to be extensions of ourselves that can work 24-7 without any coddling. So that is the future is end-to-end control just the same that you would. If you're logging into an app like Meow in four years, five years, because we've done something wrong is the way I view that. That's really interesting. So you think the future looks like the whole layer is almost obfuscated and human just needs to be in the loop to onboard the agents, essentially. Up front and so on board the agents. Over time, I think that will be like at the beginning of

the loop and then you won't have to like re-KIC an agent across like a thousand apps. But right now, the human is a harness, so to speak. They're like a safety measure as we're just the early days of this tech. But in the long run, it's pretty obvious to me. It's a bug not a feature for a human to be involved in any of these. And it's terrible things. Like bank it, who cares, right? Back office, who cares? It's something people don't want to deal with.

So why would they? When you look at maybe some of your most advanced customers, the customers that are really leaning into AI, what are these agents actually doing? Maybe bring that to life a little bit in terms of what a best in class company would be using AI agents for? Great question. So before we became the first Fentec to support bank accounts or AI agents, so agentic bank bank account openings, we had customers who were spinning up their local cloud environment.

to create dashboards. They wanted to view everything. They wanted to use our API, feed in all the data from their bank account for their company, and create internal dashboards, create alerts internally, basically flag coding their own command and control center for the office of the CFO. So that was really interesting. They weren't really interested in our dashboard. They wanted to fine tune it locally.

And we had non-technical CFOs spinning that up. This is mostly view only. Some people started delving into the world of, let me try to make it more agentic using the API, to transfer money, et cetera. But now we've come to the take. in a big way, being the first to launch bank account openings, an agentic bank account openings. So now people are actually signing up agentically. We have a channel where we just get notification and sign up and account opening, which is crazy.

This is a new channel didn't exist, but for Thursday last week. What was the hardest part about just building out the product for the AI agents? Were there obstacles? How are agents different than humans in that respect? It's very different. There's a lot of trial and error that goes into getting prompts and interacting with an agent. it's something of a black box these models under the hood. So our engineers would have to do a lot of guessing and checking.

And there's a certain feel that comes for it over time. The more you work with AI, the more you understand it. It's almost like spiritual to work with these things. So getting comfortable and understanding what makes it tick was the hardest part, basically. We're in a good spot there. When you look at just the landscape of the big model companies, it seems every few months there's just a seismic shift and one anthropic pulls in the lead. Open AI catches up. How are you seeing that evolving?

Are you building this stack to be agnostic? Do you have a preferred partner there? How do you think about it? We went heavy with the cloud branding because they seem to be the far and away winter right now, especially for businesses. But we built it to be agnostic behind the scenes. You're exactly right. So even though our branding is cloud-oriented, it's agnostic.

And yeah, I'd be terrified to just be a pure software company right now. And this is a crazy world we're entering. Do you see it impacting to broader financial services in a major way? I do because fintech is only 3 to 5% of the market for financial services. And we've been talking for a long time about, oh, banks are going to have to wiseen up because the meows, the ramps, the brexas, like, they're all coming to eat the lunch of the incumbents. That was inevitable. You know, anyone with any sense of this space knew that was inevitable.

But the rate of that now, with agents opening bank accounts now on meao, it becomes primitive technology compared to the U.S. Air Force, basically is what's happening here. So the rate of the flippening, so to speak, of traditional incumbents to the new age, tech company and fintech companies, I think that's the most obvious bet, basically, the next two, three years. It's going to be like unlike anything we've seen. You guys have obviously been at the forefront of digital assets as well in your career. Really were, I think, the first company to enable stable coin payments. I got a kick out of there was a Y Combinator company that just got funded a couple days ago

and they made a big press release about we got our funding and stable coins. And I was thinking, I think Meow has been enabling this for two years. But maybe talk a little bit about this convergence of stable coins on your platform and how you see that intercepting with AI agents. People have different velocities on this. We've always tried to be the most practical. We started deep crypto, then we went deep tradify, and we found ourselves at the most practical intersection

of business checking accounts, actual FDIC insured business checking accounts from our partner banks, cross-rubber bank, a grasshopper bank, plus the native on and off ramp, the free USDC that you could send and receive from it, the ability to hold USC as well. There are some people who go deep crypto, only crypto.

So we think the feature is only stable coins. No one's going to need a bank account Someone's going to get that. So I see merits to every side. My thesis is it's important for Meow to be the first to allow agents to open business and checking accounts, actual payments, not e-money accounts, not wallets, not virtual accounts. Because I think there's a lot that's predicated in the banking system in the U.S. for better or worse. Some people think that it's all going to be wallets.

And one of the big reasons everyone's pointing to only wallets, only stable coins is because of the friction involved with KYC, KYP. So an agent doesn't need to have an identity right now. We don't need to wait for Congress to figure that out. They can fund the wallet elsewhere. They can have some pre-funded funds somewhere, put her in the wallet or receive payments in a wallet, and send money in the wallet without requiring a human or K-YC or K-YB. We, I think I've turned that on its head a little bit because with this agentic bank account opening, man, I don't think most people thought that was possible, but we've done. I don't think banks are going away, number one.

And number two, I think no one is really thinking about this actually being the long term, which is what me out brought to the table. That makes sense. Do you imagine a world where AI agents will have a bank account? They'll also have maybe a stable coin wallet. They might have a card that facilitates maybe a deferred settlement. What does the landscape look like there? It's a good question. I think they'll do the path of least resistance for themselves.

It's the classic question of if you have a bank account, then are you also holding stable coin separately? And if so, why? So maybe there's a protocol, like a defy protocol you want to earn yield on with your stable coin wallet. If it's just to get exposure to dollars, maybe you're happy with the bank account. I think AI agents are going to be ruthless negotiators. I think they're going to pit every fintech and banking against each other.

They're going to open accounts at Maltool. They're going to say, hey, this fintech offered me this percent. I'm going to churn instantly if you give me the same amount contractually. So we'll have to deal with that. Yeah. But that's the feature we've been building towards as well. We tried to build this like Costco, so to speak. Well, you guys have also made it pretty sticky for your customers, right?

Offering other services like recordkeeping and 499 evaluations. Maybe talk a little bit about that strategy. Exactly. So we also layered in bookkeeping tax, foreign in the AI world, I don't think you need to be like a single thesis or single third as a company. I think it's counterintuitive as contrarient. But I think being multi-threaded is very important. It's not enough to do one thing very well. You need to be multi-thesis, multi-threaded.

And what we found is founders, companies don't want to deal with things. And we try to take all those things off their plate and now make it agentic. So they don't want to deal with banking, make it agentic. They don't want to deal with bookkeeping tax. Let us handle it for you. That's becoming more agentic by the day on our platform. At the end of the day, the CPA is switching from the founder to the agent. And that's what we're facing on.

It's a really interesting time from an entrepreneur's perspective, because you can make an argument that you're almost better off just starting from scratch and building a company today as opposed to having started one three years ago and have all this legacy tech debt. Maybe just talk about what you're seeing with the founders that are starting businesses and the various cohorts of meow customers and what some of the challenges are there for maybe some that didn't start early. that's a very astute point. There's this sweet spot and there's this danger zone of if you started four years ago and you're not in fintech, for example, you just a pure software company four years ago. You don't have a partnership with the bank. You don't have your own licensing. You don't have something that requires humans basically suit with a company where that four years was necessary.

You're in deep shit from my perspective because all you have is a legacy infrastructure. Legacy process is probably hundreds of people. and now you're competing with people who can set up a AI-first infrastructure, which allows you to code quickly, alert quickly, develop quickly. The slope difference is insane. There's a sweet spot that we're frankly in, thankfully, of having been around to vertically integrate the meow card. That requires a partnership with a network, a bank processor, have multiple partner banks.

You have very close with their teams over a long period of time, have compliance frameworks they've agreed to. There's a lot of compliance-oriented. I don't want to say moats, because nothing. a moat in my opinion in the long run. There's a lot of compliance-oriented things that we're able to do now that you couldn't just do out of the gate as a new company here. You need to have some trust basically, there's some relationship aspect there. But if you don't have that or a license or if you're not a hardware company or something, you're in deep trouble. The company's starting

today will outslope you in record time. Yeah. I'm sure you're getting questions from entrepreneurs in your network around just how do I get my organization up to speed here? Like, how do I get people to start building more in this agent category. Do you have any typical advice that you're giving to founders that maybe feel like they're a step behind in terms of this AI adoption? It's downstream of good engineers or your company. The good engineers or your company will already have ideas on how to make your infrastructure like more AI-friendly, basically make it such that you can share context across different parts.

The agency needs sufficient context, basically. Good engineers know that. So it won't be like a founder, frankly, understanding that, it'll be like your best engineers saying, oh, this is so obvious. We need to do this yesterday. hire good engineers, good things happen, every company industry, basically. I think about this a lot from the perspective of the banks themselves, and some of your partner banks must be seeing this. There's a big narrative with this market structure bill around

stable coin yield pulling away deposits. And maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't, didn't necessarily happen that much with the money market funds 20 years ago. But I think really the Posit Flight could potentially be just the banks that are very slow to adopt to the startups here, where there's going to be this migration of just pulling assets out of banks that are not flexible enough to allow some of these use cases. That's true. I'm generally very bearish on banks' abilities to attract deposits absent a really good fintech partner or absent lending.

It seems to me that lending is like the last kind of salvo for a lot of these banks that are going after Series B companies or large companies is offering a line on credit, basically. That's tried and true. People will crawl over glass for when you extend risks. But the ability to just attract deposits without that, that comes from a tech experience, that comes from ground game, that comes from distribution, that comes from things that banks are in deeper shit than ever, to my perspective. So some of the fintech banks will do

very well because they partner with good fintechs, and they understand that the marriage of tech company and bank, that's a marriage, very good marriage. We both do things the others can't. But the regular banks that are not lending, I don't think people are opening accounts based on the branch nearby anymore. It's based on opening your phone and getting a robin-hound account these days. To that point, it was interesting, this Brex transaction, and that trading to Capital One. Obviously, they must have been seeing some of that threat to make an acquisition like that. I imagine you'll see more of that. For sure, there's a big delta between Capital One in terms of tech forwardness and most banks, though. I think a lot of them

have their heads in the sand. But I think there's a category of banks similar to Capital One. We're probably going to see some follow-on behavior in the next year, I'd say. Yeah, that makes sense. So what's next for me out? Where do you go from here? Obviously, this is a huge swing bank accounts and virtual cards for AI agents. But where do you see this going over time? I see this getting massive. AI agents, opening bank accounts, AI agents, issuing virtual cards, sending and receiving money. You can do that all on Meowt.com today. So we're just obsessing over that experience. And we want to be the only ones doing this, the best ones doing this. We've set ourselves up well to do this with multiple partner banks, basically, in the long run. So just get more and more agents, opening bank accounts.

default there. It seems like it's a time in place from a regulatory perspective. You're sailing with the wind here, right? You're not sailing against an administration that's pushing against banking as a service partner. I think it probably would have been really hard to build this business three or four years ago. You never want to be too long, certain like administration, especially in the U.S. There tends to be like a ping pong dynamic. It goes back and forth. So you never want to be totally contingent on one party being in power or something like that. So it's important to do things right regardless such that you have a compounding business. In either case, we tend to stay away from This only works in this environment.

This only works in that environment situation. Bryn, this has been great. You guys are crushing it. Where can we send people to learn more about this offering and I guess your whole suite of offerings? Yeah. Go to meow.com slash MCP. The first agents that onward, we're going to be right close with the customers there.

We'll do case studies with you. We'll promote what you did in the process. You get to be one of your other customers in history for this. It's like opening the first online bank accounts, basically, for my perspective. So meow. com slash MCP come in and then ping us an intercom in the widget in the bottom right. We're meow customers, but we need to get onboarded to the AI agent thing. I feel like we're stuff behind if we're not onboarded in the first cohort here.

Let's do it. Appreciate them that. Awesome. Thanks, Brandon. Bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To learn more about Castle Island, visit castle island. And to listen to all of our podcast episodes, please visit castle island.vc slash podcast or just click on the tab on our website.

Thanks for listening.