Raising Seed. Founder of Palisade; ex-Ava Labs, ex-Ripple
London, United Kingdom
Joined September 2009
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This is interesting. Most teams I know throw Opus or Fable at every problem. It works but it’s expensive and inefficient.
Revolut: Europe's most valuable startup ($200B) just showed the world its AI strategy.
Every company will end up copying it.
At the start of this year, Revolut leaned on the frontier labs. Its 2,000 engineers used Claude Code and Codex, and some burned $1,000 to $10,000 a month each. The bills kept climbing, and the returns weren't there.
So Revolut switched its default to an open-source model called GLM. All it needs is GPUs, which it rents from Together AI.
The results, by Revolut's own count:
- The bill is about a tenth of what it paid OpenAI and Anthropic
- Engineers get unlimited tokens instead of spending caps
- Coding time is down 60% and lead time is down 70%
That's the chart below.
Revolut still uses Claude and GPT, but only as "the exception," for the tasks they do best. Everything else runs on open source.
So here's the question I keep coming back to: how many use cases can companies really justify sending to frontier models?
My answer is very few. Plenty of companies still route everything to OpenAI and Anthropic today. For how long?
I think open source ends up handling the vast majority of corporate AI work, and frontier models get a short list of the hardest jobs. That's a problem for labs whose revenue forecasts assume unlimited growth.
If you appreciate unpopular takes, follow me @m0xt_ for more.
ALT Revolut chart of engineering lead time and coding time, both dropping after switching to self-hosted open-source GLM
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This is true. European salaries are and always have been abysmal. No amount of work life balance justifies this level of discrepancy. Is it just weak bargaining power or some systemic issue?
Whenever I see programmer salary numbers from Europe, I always have to do a double take. It's hard to fathom that we work in the same industry. With bonuses this year, many of our folks are at $400,000+, and we're not even in any AI-hype sector.
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We are in 2025 but still exchanging doing legal red lines in Microsoft Word and exchanging them via email like its 1998. What’s going on?
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Manthan Dave retweeted
Our Co-Founder, @davemanthan , shared with @Tanzeel_Akhtar at @cryptonews , about exploring the need for regulatory clarity and addressing the SEC's vilification amid relentless innovation.
🔗 Check out the full article here - cryptonews.com/news/secs-sta…
Manthan Dave retweeted
Our Co-founder @davemanthan was featured in @DefiantNews discussing how Pectra has led to the emergence of a better user experience, more advanced wallet features that simplify the safeguarding of user funds, and improved DeFi interactions.
🔗 Read below! thedefiant.io/news/blockchai…
Manthan Dave retweeted
We're excited to be working with 🤝 @Platonic_io to bring our enterprise-grade custody to their Crypto Collateral Solution.
Together we're building mature, scalable, and safe infrastructure needed for the digital assets industry to thrive.
Platonic is thrilled to announce the launch of our Crypto Collateral Solution, eliminating centralized counterparty risk in crypto markets. Built on our proprietary Asset Operating System (aOS™) and in collaboration with @empirica_io and @palisadeinc, we're unlocking safer, faster, and more scalable trading through real-time, decentralized collateral management.
We’re not just improving how crypto trades—we’re delivering the decentralized infrastructure needed for digital asset capital markets to mature, scale, and thrive. Learn more: platonic.io/press-releases/
#Platonic #aOS #crypto #defi #cryptonews
Manthan Dave retweeted
Forecasts suggest that up to 10% of global GDP could be tokenised by 2030❗️
Our Co-Founder, @davemanthan, spoke to @RobinAmlot at @IBSIntelligence about what tokenisation is and how businesses can prepare for it.
This is my first article on geopolitics, checkout my post here: open.substack.com/pub/theman…
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10/ What do you think? Are we watching trade wars accidentally fast-track our digital financial future? Could the attempt to reassert national economic control be the very thing that undermines it?
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9/ The 2025 tariffs didn't just start a trade war—they might have inadvertently kicked open the door to a fundamentally different global financial system. Sometimes the strongest catalyst for change is making the status quo unbearable.
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8/ The big picture? Protectionist policies designed to build walls are creating demand for systems that operate beyond those walls. By making the old economy more painful to navigate, tariffs are pushing businesses toward decentralized alternatives.
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7/ We might see a strange transition: First, USD stablecoins boom (temporarily strengthening dollar influence digitally), but the infrastructure being built won't care what currency it moves long-term.
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6/ What started as economic nationalism could become the greatest advertisement for borderless finance. When government policies make traditional financial plumbing painful, alternatives outside national control look increasingly attractive.
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5/ Here's the irony: Tariffs make traditional cross-border payments more expensive, slower, and complicated—creating the perfect opening for stablecoins, which offer near-instant settlement, 24/7 operation, and 8-10% cost savings.
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4/ Crypto mining took a direct hit—Chinese-made ASIC miners facing 152.6% tariffs could force US miners offshore. But the broader crypto ecosystem? It might actually thrive in this chaos.
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3/ The economic fallout? Experts predict shrinking GDP, $1,200-$5,200 annual costs per household, and possible recession. Companies are scrambling to reroute supply chains and rethink how they move money across borders.
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2/ These tariffs are no joke: 10% base on most imports + reciprocal tariffs up to 50%, with Chinese goods getting slammed by a mind-boggling 104-152.6% when combined with existing duties.
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Manthan Dave retweeted
Our Co-Founder @davemanthan discussed the implications of this with @cryptodotnews - alongside what a better approach could be.