Origin story: from a denied visa to Causa Prima
In 2014, my US visa application was denied. That rejection led me to McKinsey, my wife, a $10B custodian, and now Causa Prima.
My first job out of university was typing order numbers into SAP all day. So when I got a Fulbright scholarship to San Francisco, I jumped at it. I fell in love with the city and wanted to stay, but Fulbright has a hard two-year home-residency clause. I had to go back.
That detour led me to McKinsey, where I spent years in strategy consulting across financial services — not the path I planned, but one of the best educations I could have asked for, especially in fintech. My first step into Madrid was a one-year MBA, where I met my now-wife Livi.
At the end of that MBA, a former McKinsey colleague and I founded Finoa. Institutional investors wanted to manage crypto, but their banks had nothing to offer them — no product, no infrastructure, no regulatory framework. So we built all of it from scratch, became the first regulated crypto custodian for institutions in the EU, and scaled to €10B in assets. After eight years, I stepped back.
Maex and I had been talking about building something together for a while — we were introduced by a VC in Madrid years ago, and he joined my board at Finoa. We teamed up with Philip Stanislaus, whom I had worked with in the early days of institutional crypto and once tried to hire as my CTO.
Eight years of moving serious institutional money taught me the hard part is never inside one company. At Finoa we built novel custody infrastructure — but the moment assets needed to move between institutions, everything slowed. Counterparties start chasing each other because no single tool has authority over the handoff. And with agentic AI about to reshape how businesses operate, the volume of transactions between companies is only going to grow.
That is what we are building Causa Prima to be: a layer that sits between companies and handles both sides of every transaction, so money moves the way it is supposed to. And we are hiring our founding team.