Bequest Finance: Pioneering the Legacy of Digital Asset Management

By: Tom Brown, Jasleen Kaur, Izzi Steinhaus

As early stage investors, our mission is to identify founders with the potential to reshape industries and ignite innovation. Today, we are thrilled to introduce you to Anna Mouland and Robert Muresan, and their company Bequest Finance. We believe Bequest will revolutionize the intergenerational transfer of digital assets.

The Digital Asset Frontier

The process of digitizing assets is still in its infancy, but the potential is staggering. As of June 2023, global cryptocurrency holdings were valued at $1.2 trillion, with 425 million crypto users worldwide and 46 million in the United States alone. This is the tip of the iceberg. While cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum often dominate headlines, there exists a vast universe of intangible assets waiting to be accounted for that leaves the $1.2 trillion number in the dust.

Traditionally, estate planning has centered around tangible assets such as real estate, automobiles, art, and jewelry. However, in addition to these tangible assets, modern households possess all sorts of valuable intangible assets. These intangible assets range from traditional IP like patents and copyrighted works to everyday remnants of an online presence such as URLs, social media accounts, e-gaming profiles, and even family photos. Some of the assets have only sentimental value, but many have substantial monetary value. As the American Bar Association has acknowledged, there has historically been no good way to manage the transfer of these assets.

Enter Bequest Finance

Bequest, co-founded by Anna Mouland and Robert Muresan, was born out of a recognition of the challenges associated with the succession of digital assets. Their platform is designed to address this gap by making it easy for the trust and estate industry to identify and securely transfer those assets without exposing the keys that control those assets to the risk of theft.

What sets Bequest apart is its mission to disrupt the multi-trillion dollar trusts and estates industry through cutting-edge non-custodial distribution solutions for digital assets, beginning with cryptocurrency assets and then expanding to other types of intangible assets as described above. Estate planners will have the power to support a wide range of digital assets, from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to email accounts and multimedia content, all without controlling the private keys associated with those digital assets.

Bequest ultimately aims to address a pressing issue in our digital age: the seamless transfer of digital assets to the next generation, tackling not only the transfer of digital currency but also positioning itself to handle any password-protected digital asset in the future.

The Path Forward with Bequest Finance

Our recent investment in Bequest is a bet on the future of digital asset management. With this infusion of capital, Bequest plans to bolster its innovative solutions with support for a variety of digital assets. These solutions don’t just expand the market; they have the potential to unlock an annual influx of tens of billions of dollars, showcasing the immense promise that lies ahead.

The co-founders of Bequest aim to bring a fresh perspective to the industry with their prior experience. Anna’s past roles as an engineer at Aquanow and VRRB Labs offer invaluable insights into the complexities of digital assets, and Robert’s contributions to the engineering teams at Bitgo and Shopify further supercharge their combined engineering talent.

Investing in a Vision

As investors in businesses at the earliest stages, we understand that the real investment is not just in the company, but in its people. Anna and Robert are truly exceptional talents. We share their view that the future of wealth transfer will be digital and that people deserve tools to make the most difficult transition easier. They are uniquely equipped to make that vision a reality, and we are excited to help them realize that vision.

We believe the future sits undeniably in the digitization of the offline, and Bequest stands at the forefront of this evolution in wealth management, leading the way into an exciting era of transformation.