The story of a stereotypical startup founder has a familiar arc: Drop out of college, launch a startup, raise billions, go public, and then ride off into the sunset as an angel investor in your 40s. That’s not Thijn Lamers. A former executive at the $60 billion fintech giant Adyen, Lamers, who’s in his 50s but declined to specify his exact age, announced on Tuesday he is now president and cofounder of stablecoin startup Noah. “I get so much energy from building,” he said. “I feel like I have the energy of [when I was] 25.”
Lamers’s announcement coincided with news that Noah has raised $22 million in a seed funding round led by LocalGlobe, a veteran venture capital outfit in Europe. Other participants include Felix Capital, FJ Labs, as well as angel investors like Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Alexander Matthey, a former CTO at Adyen.
Noah cofounder and CEO Shah Ramezani, a 33-year-old former UBS analyst, declined to disclose the valuation for the startup but did say, in a nod to Lamers’ decades of experience, “there was a Thijn premium.”
The pair join a crowded field. Stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to real-world assets like the U.S. dollar, have become a buzzy technology among VCs. Investors have piled into a suite of startups who promise to use the digital tokens to speed up cross-border transactions and reduce fees from banking transfers.
Even large fintechs like Stripe and Big Tech stalwarts like Meta are taking notice. And with a gangbuster IPO from stablecoin issuer Circle, others may be looking to replicate its success.
Still, Lamers and Ramezani believe they have an edge. “I would say the most important thing in payments, and that’s why a dropout from MIT [finds it] hard to compete, is the network,” Ramezani said.
His comment underscores how fintech giants build competitive moats through relationships with regulators, customers, and banking partners. And Lamers, who led global sales at Adyen, certainly brings a network with him, including relationships with former executives at Big Tech firms like rideshare giant Uber. “Everything is credibility,” Lamers said.
In fact, the most successful tech founders are, on average, 45 years old, according to a 2018 analysis from Harvard Business Review.
Investor to cofounder
Lamers, who left Adyen in 2018, originally met Ramezani as an investor, not a cofounder. In 2022, Ramezani began exploring how to use cryptocurrencies for payments. He first toyed around with Bitcoin before he decided to raise money for a startup that sells access to an API, or application programming interface, which lets software developers easily transfer funds with stablecoins.
“We’re really building ‘Noah’s ark’ to save everyone from the mass currency inflation,” Ramezani said, explaining the reasoning behind his startup’s name.
Lamers became so interested in Ramezani’s venture that, instead of just investing, he joined as cofounder in June 2024. Now, the pair have grown Noah’s product offerings to let users convert between 50 currencies and transfer money between 70 countries in real-time—as opposed to waiting perhaps days for bank wires to clear. So far, the company has processed more than $1 billion in transaction volumes, according to Ramezani.
“This guy has so much energy, I’m, like, actually blown away,” said Ramezani, in reference to his cofounder. “Thijn is really like a beast.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
