Alex Fine of Fun on the dollars and cents of starting up

It may have been before your time, but there was an era when buying things online was frustrating. You had to manually enter your credit card, bank account routing numbers, and billing addresses for every site. Then, in 1997, Amazon introduced 1-Click, which made it possible to save a card and pay with a single click. In 1999, the company later known as PayPal unveiled electronic payments, letting people send money over email without providing card details to the recipient. Then, in 2011, Stripe launched, letting developers embed checkout into any site. This allowed any company with an online presence to build payments into its product, with Stripe’s infrastructure serving as the invisible layer handling the complicated processing underneath.

Serving as an invisible layer is exactly what payment infrastructure company Fun hopes to do for applications building on blockchains. Typically, if a regular person wants to use a crypto-based app, it’s a headache. They have to set up a complicated digital wallet, memorize a 12-word security phrase, buy a specific cryptocurrency, and pay confusing “gas fees” just to move money across different blockchains. Fun provides the infrastructure that lets apps like the prediction marketplace Polymarket move users’ money across blockchains without requiring them to navigate crypto’s complexities.

For Fun founder and CEO Alex Fine, the opportunity appeared enormous. He dropped out of Stanford University in 2020 to build Fun based on his belief that fintech applications were going to be built on blockchain, because in his view, blockchain was a better way to move money and store data. Fine believed this would become one of the biggest industries of his lifetime, the kind of problem worth going deep on. Although he saw a category opportunity, at first he didn’t know exactly what to build within it. So after asking dozens of teams he admired in the space where they were spending their money, he uncovered the problem Fun set out to solve — that it’s hard to onboard global users given the intricacies of local infrastructures.

We sat down with Fine to discuss Fun’s recent $72 million Series A, why the startup prioritizes talent density over massive headcount in the age of AI, and how it bootstraps distribution through warm investor networks.

The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Mary Ann Azevedo: How much do you spend each month? Where do most of your costs go?

Alex Fine: Our total spend is $1 million to $2 million, and 80% of it goes to people. In addition to 32 [full-time employees], we have another 10 full-time contractors in support, others on compliance, and other contractors for engineering as well. We’re super lean, and we intend to stay really lean. I don’t think you need to build big teams in the age of AI.

If 80% of your expenses go towards people, where does the other 20% go?

[Mostly] software. There’s also a small marketing budget, travel to conferences — those would be the other main categories.

What tech stack did you launch with? How much did it cost to build it?

Our infrastructure is built with TypeScript and runs on AWS servers, and our SDK is built with React. We spend roughly $200,000 to $300,000 a month on software. It’s a clean, efficient stack that allows us to iterate quickly.

With AI, it’s an interesting and challenging time for distribution. How did you determine your distribution strategy, and what’s been most effective?

I think product quality is one way to crack distribution. Our whole business is [...] about product quality. We’ve earned the right to sell to and work with customers because we can drive more volume for them than others. Most of our leads come through high-quality introductions. In fact, we meet roughly 95% of our customers through warm introductions from our investor network. We have about 80 angel and institutional backers, including firms such as Multicoin Capital, SignalFire, and Streamlined Ventures, as well as individual investors such as Justin Mateen, Cory Levy, and Charles Songhurst.

Are there any mistakes you made early on that you learned a lot from?

There have certainly been mistakes, and each has been a learning opportunity. I think one of the biggest mistakes was trying to build a team and a business without clear product-market fit and customers willing to pay for what we were building. What ultimately worked was focusing on specific signed contracts and building based on what we knew people wanted.

And then, how do you protect that advantage? It feels like everybody has a different idea of what a moat is these days.

I try to keep a list of top priorities tied to our longer-term business goals. Each day, I update it and focus on the tangible tasks that move us closer to those outcomes.

On moats: In our vertical inside of fintech, I generally see three types of true moats that I believe will remain important. First, I see liquidity moats in exchanges. The more buyers and sellers actively using a platform, the more likely it is to attract more market participants. Then there are switching cost moats. This is when your technology runs the entire back office of an application, making it incredibly difficult to rip out. Then there are network effects, which is like the classic Visa or Mastercard model.

For early-stage companies today, most perceived moats are just head starts. Actual operational moats don’t materialize until you reach a massive scale. Which means that in the current environment, the only real, sustainable moat an early company can have is talent density. Having a high talent density is really important for us.

To attract that talent, we split hiring between external recruiters and internal employee referrals. But, really, referrals are our favorite method because prior connections mitigate risk and give us a higher level of confidence before hiring. We want to focus entirely on maintaining that density in the long-term.

Earlier this year, Fun raised a $72 million Series A, co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire. How did you raise funding in 2026? Was it competitive? How long did it take you, and were there a lot of no’s?

I’ve learned there are two ways to raise capital: one is to spend months building relationships with investors, so you know who to partner with when you’re ready to raise. The other is to focus almost entirely on the business until it’s time to raise, then run a concentrated fundraising process. We took the second approach.

We met with everyone over a relatively short period, found partners who really understood our vision, and moved quickly. There are always investors who pass, but we were fortunate to have strong interest from the people we wanted around the table.

Ultimately, we were able to raise the round because we’re growing very, very quickly. We have maintained consistent 20% to 30% month-over-month volume growth for over a year and a half.

The round was heavily oversubscribed from the start. We even chose to turn down capital and declined further dilution because we didn’t need the extra cash. We just don’t need to over-dilute ourselves.

What do you plan to do with that capital?

The allocation proportions will stay the same — it’s all people. We’ll just pay higher salaries and get better and better talent.