Castle
Automated bitcoin treasury solution for small and medium businesses.
Website: https://savewithcastle.com
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Castle (formerly Orqestra) |
| Tagline | Automated bitcoin treasury solution for small and medium businesses |
| Headquarters | Miami, FL |
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry | Fintech |
| Technology | Blockchain / Web3 |
| Geography | North America |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2): João Almeida, Stephen Cole |
| Funding Label | Seed |
| Total Disclosed | ~$1,000,000 [Fintech Review] |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://savewithcastle.com/
- GitHub: https://github.com/orqestra
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/orqestra
- Wellfound: https://wellfound.com/company/castle-io/people
- LinkedIn (co-founder João Almeida): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo%C3%A3o-almeida-451714a8/
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Castle, a Miami-based fintech operating under the parent entity Orqestra, sells an automated bitcoin treasury product aimed at small and medium businesses that want to convert a portion of operating revenue into bitcoin without building their own custody or accounting workflow [Crunchbase] [Castle Website]. The company surfaced publicly in mid-2025 with a $1 million seed round led by Boost VC, with participation from Winklevoss Capital, Park Rangers Capital, Epoch VC, and angels [Fintech Review] [Refresh Miami]. The product sits between point-of-sale and bookkeeping infrastructure, automatically routing a configurable share of sales from PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Square, and QuickBooks into bitcoin while preserving a clean accounting trail [Castle Website] [Nasdaq]. Co-founders João Almeida (CTO, also referenced as CEO across earlier sources) and Stephen Cole are running a small team out of Miami, a city that has positioned itself as a domestic hub for crypto-native fintech [Refresh Miami] [LinkedIn]. The funding label is intentionally modest: this is a focused early bet on whether the bitcoin treasury thesis, popularized at the corporate scale by MicroStrategy and at the consumer scale by Swan and River, can be productized for the long tail of Main Street businesses. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the signals worth tracking are merchant counts on integrated platforms (especially Shopify and Stripe), the addition of regulated custody partners, and whether Castle can attach a recurring SaaS fee on top of any spread or conversion economics. The bet is small, the category is real, and the investor list is unusually well-aligned for the thesis.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Fintech Review, Refresh Miami, Bitcoin Magazine, and Castle's own website.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Seed |
| Business Model | SaaS |
| Industry / Vertical | Fintech / Bitcoin treasury |
| Technology Type | Blockchain / Web3 |
| Geography | North America (US SMB focus) |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Two co-founders, technical lead |
| Funding | Seed, ~$1.0M disclosed |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Castle is the consumer-facing brand of Orqestra, the legal entity that holds the Crunchbase profile and the GitHub organization of the same name [Crunchbase] [GitHub]. Refresh Miami, the local outlet that covered the funding announcement, explicitly notes the rebrand from Orqestra to Castle and frames the company as "a bitcoin treasury platform for small and medium-sized businesses" [Refresh Miami]. The company is headquartered in Miami, a deliberate choice given the city's concentration of crypto-aligned investors, exchanges, and policy advocacy. A precise founding year is not disclosed in the public record reviewed for this report.
The co-founding team is João Almeida and Stephen Cole. Almeida's LinkedIn lists him as CTO and co-founder of Castle, while the company's about page and earlier press attribute the CEO role to him as well, suggesting either a recent title shift or shared executive responsibilities between the two co-founders [LinkedIn] [Castle Website]. Stephen Cole is named as the second co-founder in the structured record but does not yet have a widely indexed public profile tied to Castle, which is consistent with a sub-ten-person seed-stage team.
The most material milestone to date is the seed round announced on June 27, 2025, which brought in $1 million led by Boost VC with participation from Winklevoss Capital, Park Rangers Capital, and Epoch VC [Fintech Review] [Bitcoin Magazine] [Yahoo Finance]. Refresh Miami characterizes the round as pre-seed in size while the broader fintech press labels it seed; the dollar amount, lead, and syndicate are consistent across all sources. Proceeds are earmarked for platform development and onboarding US SMB customers nationwide [Fintech Review].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, Refresh Miami, Fintech Review, and Bitcoin Magazine.
Product and Technology
MIXED
Castle's product is a thin, opinionated layer that sits between a merchant's existing payment and accounting stack and a bitcoin custody backend. The pitch on the company's homepage is direct: "Automated bitcoin treasury solution for small and medium businesses. Integrations into payment and bookkeeping solutions that make buying and holding bitcoin smooth and secure" [Castle Website]. In practice, that means a merchant connects Castle to the systems where revenue lands, sets a percentage of incoming sales to be converted, and Castle handles the conversion and the bookkeeping entry.
The confirmed integration set is unusually concrete for a seed-stage product. The about page lists conversions from PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe directly into bitcoin [Castle Website]. Press coverage carried by Nasdaq and several syndicated outlets adds QuickBooks and Square to the integration list, framing Castle as a tool that "integrates with QuickBooks, PayPal, Square, and Stripe to automatically convert portions of revenue into bitcoin" [Nasdaq] [The AI Journal]. The bookkeeping side of the integration matters more than it might appear at first glance: one of the operational frictions that has historically discouraged SMBs from holding bitcoin is the cost-basis and tax-lot accounting overhead, and embedding into QuickBooks is a credible way to remove it.
The technology stack underneath is not publicly documented. The Orqestra GitHub organization exists but has no public members or repositories indexed, which is normal for a seed company keeping its codebase private [GitHub]. Custody arrangements, the identity of the executing exchange or OTC venue, and the regulatory wrapper Castle uses to move customer fiat into bitcoin are not described in the cited sources reviewed for this report. Investors evaluating the company should expect those details under NDA rather than from public surfaces.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Castle Website, Nasdaq, and Bitcoin Magazine.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
The SMB bitcoin treasury thesis sits at the intersection of two trends that have matured independently and are only now being combined into a single product wedge.
The first trend is the corporate bitcoin treasury playbook, popularized at scale by MicroStrategy beginning in 2020 and extended through 2024 and 2025 by a growing list of public companies adding bitcoin to their balance sheets. That playbook is now well-understood at the Fortune 1000 level but remains operationally out of reach for the long tail of US small businesses, who lack the treasury function, custody relationships, and accounting tooling to replicate it. Castle's pitch, as Refresh Miami frames it, is to make bitcoin "the quiet hero of Main Street balance sheets" [Refresh Miami]. The second trend is the embedded-fintech model that has reshaped SMB software over the past decade: Stripe, Square, Shopify, and QuickBooks have each become distribution rails through which adjacent financial products (lending, payroll, insurance, savings) are sold. Castle is positioning bitcoin allocation as the next product to ride those rails.
A precise TAM figure for "bitcoin treasury for SMBs" is not available from a named third-party report in the cited research. Useful analogues exist. The US Small Business Administration estimates roughly 33 million small businesses in the United States, and Stripe and Shopify together process payments for several million of them; even a low-single-digit-percent adoption rate of an automated bitcoin allocation product would represent tens of thousands of paying merchants. The economics for the platform come from some combination of subscription, conversion spread, and assets-under-treasury fees, none of which Castle has publicly disclosed at this stage.
Demand drivers worth naming are concrete. Bitcoin spot ETF approval in January 2024 normalized the asset for traditional financial advisors and accountants, which lowers the social cost for an SMB owner to allocate a portion of revenue. The 2025 US policy environment has tilted notably more accommodative toward digital assets at the federal level, reducing the perceived regulatory tail risk for products like Castle's. On the substitute side, the most credible alternatives for an SMB owner are (a) doing nothing and holding cash, (b) buying a spot bitcoin ETF in a brokerage account, or (c) using a consumer-grade exchange like Coinbase or a bitcoin-only platform like Swan or River and handling the bookkeeping manually. Castle's wedge is the automation and the accounting integration, not access to bitcoin itself.
Regulatory and macro forces cut both ways. A favorable rate-cut cycle and continued bitcoin price appreciation would pull demand forward; a sharp drawdown in bitcoin or a state-level money-transmitter enforcement action against a similar platform would slow it. Investors should treat the regulatory wrapper Castle operates under as a first-order diligence item.
| Sizing reference | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| US small businesses (denominator for SMB fintech) | ~33 million | US SBA (analogous market) |
| Castle seed raise | $1.0M | [Fintech Review] |
| Confirmed integration partners | 5 (PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Square, QuickBooks) | [Castle Website] [Nasdaq] |
The table reads as the macro denominator on top, the company's current capital and surface area below. The mismatch is the point: Castle is attempting to address a very large denominator with a deliberately small first check, which is the right shape for a seed-stage wedge but means execution speed on integrations and merchant acquisition will determine whether the next round is competitive.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- TAM is analogue-based; integration and funding figures confirmed by Castle Website, Nasdaq, and Fintech Review.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
Castle is positioned as the bookkeeping-native, automated alternative to consumer-grade bitcoin accumulation platforms, with the SMB treasury use case as its differentiating wedge.
| Company | Positioning | Stage / Funding | Notable Differentiator | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Castle | Automated bitcoin treasury for SMBs, integrated with payment and accounting tools | Seed, ~$1.0M | QuickBooks + payments-stack integration aimed at merchants, not consumers | [Fintech Review] [Castle Website] |
| Swan Bitcoin | Bitcoin-only accumulation platform for individuals and businesses | Private, multiple priced rounds | Brand and educational content moat in the bitcoin-maximalist community | [Crunchbase] |
| River Financial | Bitcoin-only brokerage and savings platform with business accounts | Private, Series B reported | Licensed brokerage and full-reserve custody messaging | [Crunchbase] |
The competitive map breaks into three layers. The first layer is bitcoin-only platforms with explicit business offerings, primarily Swan and River, both of which have business accounts and recurring buy features but were built consumer-first and do not natively integrate into a merchant's payment processor or general ledger. The second layer is general-purpose crypto exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini), which offer business accounts and APIs and could in principle replicate Castle's automation, but historically have prioritized trading volume over accounting workflow. The third layer is the embedded-finance roadmap of the platforms Castle integrates with: Stripe, Shopify, and Square have each at various points offered crypto-adjacent features, and any of them could in theory build a first-party version of what Castle sells.
Castle's defensible edge today is the combination of accounting integration and a thesis-pure investor base. Winklevoss Capital and Boost VC are among the most credible bitcoin-native investors in the early-stage market, and their participation gives Castle access to custody partners, licensing playbooks, and merchant introductions that a generic fintech seed round would not provide [Fintech Review] [Bitcoin Magazine]. The QuickBooks integration in particular is a workflow moat: once a merchant's cost basis and tax lots live inside Castle, switching costs are non-trivial. That moat is durable so long as Castle continues to lead on the bookkeeping side; it is perishable if a larger player ships a competing QuickBooks app with similar mechanics.
The most exposed flank is distribution. Swan and River own bitcoin-native customer acquisition channels (podcasts, conference sponsorships, the Bitcoin Magazine ecosystem) that Castle does not yet own at scale, and Stripe or Shopify could, if either chose to, distribute a competing product to millions of merchants overnight. Castle does not control either channel. The most plausible 18-month scenario worth naming: Castle wins if it locks in a first-party listing or revenue-share arrangement inside the Shopify or QuickBooks app marketplace and builds a defensible merchant book before a platform incumbent ships a competing feature; Castle loses ground if Stripe or Square announces a native bitcoin allocation product before Castle reaches a few thousand paying merchants.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
If Castle executes, the prize is becoming the default treasury and accounting layer through which US small businesses hold bitcoin.
The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome Castle could plausibly become is the bitcoin treasury equivalent of what Gusto became for SMB payroll or what Pilot became for SMB bookkeeping: a category-defining, integration-rich product that owns a specific financial workflow inside the long tail of US businesses. The cited evidence makes that outcome reachable rather than aspirational for three reasons. First, the integration footprint is already broad for a $1M-funded company, spanning PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Square, and QuickBooks [Castle Website] [Nasdaq]. Second, the investor syndicate, led by Boost VC with Winklevoss Capital and Park Rangers Capital, brings exactly the kind of custody, licensing, and ecosystem relationships this category requires [Fintech Review]. Third, the macro environment in 2025 (spot ETF normalization, an accommodative US digital-asset policy posture) reduces the friction for an SMB owner to say yes for the first time. None of these guarantee the outcome, but together they make the path legible.
Two or three growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| App-marketplace wedge | Castle becomes a featured app inside the Shopify and/or QuickBooks marketplace and onboards merchants programmatically | A formal listing or revenue-share deal with one of the integrated platforms | Castle is already integrated with both surfaces [Castle Website] [Nasdaq] |
| Bitcoin-native channel partner | Castle becomes the SMB-treasury referral product for a larger bitcoin platform that does not want to build SMB accounting itself | A partnership with a custody or brokerage incumbent in the Winklevoss or Boost network | Investor base is concentrated in bitcoin-native firms with complementary distribution [Fintech Review] [Bitcoin Magazine] |
| Regional accountant channel | CPAs and bookkeepers serving SMBs adopt Castle as the default tool when a client wants a bitcoin allocation | A QuickBooks ProAdvisor listing plus accountant-focused content | QuickBooks integration already in place; accountant channel is well-established for SMB fintech [Nasdaq] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel that turns one customer into the next has three components. The first is data: every additional merchant adds cost-basis and tax-lot history to Castle's books, which raises switching costs and makes the product more useful at year-end. The second is integration depth: each marginal integration (a new POS, a new accounting suite, a new payroll provider) makes the next merchant easier to onboard and reduces the marginal cost of acquisition through the partner's marketplace. The third is custodial scale: as assets-under-treasury grow, Castle's use to negotiate better custody terms, better execution spreads, and better insurance improves, which can be passed through as either margin or price. None of these flywheels are spinning yet at meaningful scale, and the public record does not yet show merchant counts or AUT figures, but the architectural conditions for them are present.
The size of the win. A credible comparable for the upside, used here as a scenario rather than a forecast, is the public-market valuation history of bitcoin-native financial platforms and SMB fintech category leaders. Coinbase trades as a multi-billion-dollar public company, Block (parent of Square) is a tens-of-billions market cap, and Gusto was last reported at a roughly $9.5 billion private valuation. If Castle reached even a low-single-digit-percent share of US SMBs as a paying treasury customer, with a modest blended take rate across subscription and conversion economics, the resulting business would clear the bar for a category-leader outcome in fintech (scenario, not a forecast). The realistic near-term win is much smaller and much more specific: become the default bitcoin treasury app inside one of the integrated marketplaces within 18 months, and use that position to raise a priced Series A on the strength of merchant count rather than narrative.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenario analysis is analyst inference; underlying integration, funding, and investor facts confirmed by Castle Website, Fintech Review, Nasdaq, and Bitcoin Magazine.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Castle] Castle | Automated Bitcoin Treasury Solution | https://savewithcastle.com/
[Castle] Castle - About | https://savewithcastle.com/about
[Castle] Castle - Pricing | https://savewithcastle.com/pricing
[Crunchbase] Castle - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/orqestra
[Crunchbase] Castle - Profiles & Contacts | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/orqestra/profiles_and_contacts
[GitHub] Castle (Orqestra) GitHub organization | https://github.com/orqestra
[Fintech Review] Castle Raises $1M to Bring Automated Bitcoin Treasury Solution to U.S. Businesses | https://fintechreview.net/castle-raises-1m-to-bring-automated-bitcoin-treasury-solution-to-u-s-businesses/
[Financial News] Castle Raises $1M to Bring Automated Bitcoin Treasury Solution to U.S. Businesses | https://www.financial-news.co.uk/castle-raises-1m-to-bring-automated-bitcoin-treasury-solution-to-u-s-businesses/
[Refresh Miami] Castle secures $1M to make bitcoin the quiet hero of Main Street balance sheets | https://refreshmiami.com/news/castle-secures-1M-to-make-bitcoin-the-quiet-hero-of-main-street-balance-sheets/
[Bitcoin Magazine] Castle Raises $1M To Bring Automated Bitcoin Treasury To Small & Medium-Sized Businesses | https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/castle-raises-1m-to-bring-automated-bitcoin-treasury-to-small-medium-sized-businesses
[Yahoo Finance] Castle Raises $1M to Bring Automated Bitcoin Treasury Solution to U.S. Businesses | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/castle-raises-1m-bring-automated-174900156.html
[The AI Journal] Castle Raises $1M to Bring Automated Bitcoin Treasury Solution to U.S. Businesses | https://aijourn.com/castle-raises-1m-to-bring-automated-bitcoin-treasury-solution-to-u-s-businesses/
[Nasdaq] Castle press coverage on integrations with QuickBooks, PayPal, Square, and Stripe | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/castle-raises-1m-bring-automated-174900156.html
[Wellfound] Castle: Founder, Leadership & Team | https://wellfound.com/company/castle-io/people
[LinkedIn] João Almeida - CTO & Co-Founder - Castle | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo%C3%A3o-almeida-451714a8/
[Tracxn] Savewithcastle - 2025 Company Profile & Funding | https://tracxn.com/d/companies/savewithcastle/__N3zzPhZm8791mh-Nz5UVnvWmZRdvpmjYWEW8GKMz6h4
[PitchBook] Park Rangers Capital investment portfolio | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/541292-41
Articles about Castle
- Castle Wants Every Shopify Checkout to Funnel a Slice Into Bitcoin — The Miami startup raised $1M from Boost VC and Winklevoss Capital to wire SMB revenue into automated bitcoin treasuries.