Meanwhile raises $82M to build the world's first Bitcoin-denominated life insurance company

seems like there's quite a lot of demand, so good luck keeping up with it. Thanks for the support. We'll talk soon. Our next guest is in the wrist room waiting room. But first, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home but better. We have Zack from Meanwhile coming into the TVP and Ultra Drum. Zach, how are you doing? It is. Welcome. Great. Happy to be here. Great to have you.

Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company. We'd love to learn some. Uh yeah, my name is Zach. I'm a longtime fintech entrepreneur. Uh, I've built Meanwhile, Meanwhile is the world's first Bitcoin life insurance company, but our intention is to build the world's largest life insurance company.

How does Bitcoin and life insurance fit together? How's the normal life insurance market? How is this different? Um, walk me through um just the like one step deeper in the thesis or the product. Yeah. So, the normal life insurance market, you know, this is about 3% of global GDP.

You've probably never talked about it once on the show, but it is gigantic. Um, it is not just life insurance. It's about retirement savings. It's about uh, you know, protecting your family when you die, but what also happens to your family when you live longer than you're supposed to. That's deferred annuities.

It's insurance bonds. It's all sorts of saving products. Um, it's a huge, huge market that is completely untouched by technology. And the reason it's untouched by technology is because you need to be big for technology to matter.

So that is why you have a bunch of companies who have like built marketing engines on top of the global life insurance ecosystem. Uh what we've done is we have built a full stack vertically integrated life insurance company in Bermuda. It just happens to entirely be denominated in Bitcoin.

And what that means practically is if you want to save for the long term, uh, you can now do it in Bitcoin. And there are tax advantages and there's estate and, you know, tax planning reasons to do that.

But fundamentally, what we see is that if I bought a life insurance policy in 2018 when my son was born, I've seen the purchasing power of that dollar policy go down 25 30%. Whereas if I had done that in Bitcoin, I've seen the purchasing power go up hundreds of percent.

And we want to bring that not just to everyone in America. But if you're a middle- class person in Argentina, you don't save for your retirement because you are going to live longer than the Argentinian peso. So that person should save in bitcoin. Okay. So uh you want a million dollar life insurance plan to Yeah.

walk 10 bitcoins by paying in bitcoin because most people think about their life insurance policy is okay it's going to be $100 a month I have a job I can pay that if it's in bitcoin it goes up and then all of a sudden I can't make the payments like how does all that flow yeah so the current product that we do direct to consumer but this round's actually about all this other stuff we do uh is uh it's called whole life so it lasts your whole life it's very well named Um you uh in our case you might pay I'm going to use big round numbers.

You might pay one bitcoin a year for 10 years. So you've paid us 10 bitcoin and then whenever you die you get 15 bitcoin. Okay. But yes, you're absolutely right. In a way you're short bitcoin. So I suggest do not buy a policy bigger than your existing amount of bitcoin. Interesting.

Uh what you mentioned some you you just raised uh 82 million. So, we should acknowledge that $82 million from Bane, Apollo, Northwestern Mutual, that's big. Han Ventures, and uh Pantara, a couple others. What uh what was the catalyst for this round?

What are you working on outside of the direct to consumer product that you just mentioned? Yeah. So, actually, uh we raised a series A in February that was $40 million from Framework and Ful and Wes. Okay.

And what happened after that round is that a ton of the largest life insurance and retirement companies in the world approached us and asked us if we could work with them to bring these products to their markets if we could help them do indexed annuities, index life insurance that had exposure to Bitcoin.

Uh and that is how this $82 million round came about is that Han and Bang Cap Crypto in particular um they had sort of been hovering around. They reached out to us in the summer. They said, "You're one of the most important companies in going to be one of the most important companies in crypto. Can we invest?

" And I said, "For a large enough check, you can do it. " I love the uh love the honesty. What uh what is it about uh give give us the lore Bermuda lore? Uh I've only been there on vacation, but uh it sounds unamerican to me, but I'll let you defend it.

Well, it's it's a it's it's long been a a sort of, you know, financial hub and has like some deep history and ties between, you know, tradition, you know, Wall Street and and Bermuda. You're not winning me over. It's not in America. Yeah.

So, the fundamental history is that Bermuda used to be a tourist destination when you had to get on a boat to go to your vacation spot. And once there was an airplane, you're like, I'm going to go to the Bahamas or I'm going to go to Jamaica.

Bermuda is actually like way out in the middle of nowhere in the ocean and it's just not as hot as you'd like, right? So, and it's the Bermuda Bermuda Triangle out there. Bermuda Triangle, you know, not not a great uh history on boats.

So uh basically they had some really enterprising people in the ' 50s and the 1950s and60s who decided to make it an offshore financial hub and now it is like the insurance capital of the world.

So I'm surprised you went there on vacation because there is about as many actuaries, lawyers and accountants on Bermuda as there are Bermudans. uh you walk around and it's like Munich, Chub, Swiss, it's like huge financial institutions and I guess the next huge financial institution there is going to be meanwhile.

Congratulations. That is that's amazing. Is is the Bermuda Triangle fake news or are you taking a wild route when you go there? Are you avoiding that? I'm going to call it fake news, but uh they're actually Bermuda has this really crazy history. They did a lot of things.

They like ran a a ruthless salt monopoly over the Caribbean. They were like gun runners in the civil war. They had ran a penal colony. They like why not finance? They have found ways to um be innovative for hundreds of years.

So if uh so if me and you are flying in a Cessna to Bermuda, you're not telling me to fly around the fly right through the through the triangle. That's right. I've only been there on commercial jets, so I'm not prepared to support the Cessna plan. But But you're fearless. Generally around the triangle.

Generally fearless. That's great to hear. That's what it takes to take on a $3 trillion industry. I like it. I like it. You shouldn't be afraid of the triangle. You shouldn't be afraid financial markets. How are you innovating on the direct like the actual experience?

I got a uh I I got life insurance through my neighbor who happened to be an agent. it was kind of this weird uh you know it's it's it's not a um it's not a didn't feel like the most seamless digitally native process.

So there's also I think a lot that you can do on on the actual yeah fundamentally look we want to do with a thousand people what Alian does with 100,000 people.

Um our we didn't mention it but Sam Alman actually led our seed round and our pitch to Sam was this is a once in a century opportunity that we can use digital money in the form of bitcoin and stable coins to reach billions of people with these savings products and then we can use AI and automation to serve them profitably.

So we have built everything from the ground up. We are a fully vertically integrated lifeurer. Uh so yeah the the experience of uh filling out the application is quite seamless. People can get underwritten and we can close policies in a single day. We do all our actuarial we close our books.

This sounds so boring but we close our books in like 2 and 1/2 hours at the corner end. Most insurance companies we're talking like 45 days but we do all of that. Like we have a chief risk officer, we have an enterprise risk manager. We have all this boring stuff.

But because we've built it, you know, feature by feature, step by step, system by system, uh, we are building a durable advantage in the life insurance space.