Santa Cruz has never been short on big ideas. The problem is that finance, especially anything touching crypto, has spent the last decade acting like a group project where nobody read the rubric. Institutions want exposure to digital assets, but not the regulatory hangover, the operational mess, or the reputational risk. That gap, the space between “we want in” and “we can’t touch that,” is exactly where Fortuna Tech Labs is planting its flag.

Bernardo Teixeira, founder and CEO of Fortuna Tech Labs, is building regulated, AI-driven financial infrastructure for digital assets, designed for institutions and high-volume traders. In plain English: they’re trying to make the plumbing work, so grown-up money can move through crypto without everything breaking. They automate compliance, liquidity, and fiat-to-crypto operations with a unified stack built from day one to be audit-ready and licensing-first.

Why does this matter? Because the current landscape is, to use the technical term, busted. Fortuna points to a market where roughly $1.5T in digital assets lacks compliant infrastructure for institutional flow, while regulatory onboarding can take 12-18 months for new entrants. Meanwhile, manual KYC/AML costs fintechs $4B+ annually, and fiat-crypto operations are still slow, opaque, and full of friction. The result is a familiar stalemate: institutions want exposure, but not the operational or regulatory risk.

Fortuna’s answer is a “regulated, AI-powered infra stack” where autonomous AI agents streamline KYC/AML, KYB, and reporting, paired with integrated fiat rails, an OTC desk, a Bitcoin ATM network, and a liquidity layer they call MonetaDEX. The point is not novelty. It’s consolidation. One unified stack means faster onboarding, lower costs, and higher trust. That’s the kind of boring that wins markets.

They’re also leaning into timing. Fortuna Tech Labs argues that 2024 brought clearer crypto-fiat rules in the U.S., institutions like BlackRock, Fidelity, and JP Morgan have re-engaged, and AI has matured into something enterprise teams will actually deploy for compliance and fraud detection. Add a “massive licensing gap” where only a handful of players are ready to scale legally, and you get a rare window for category leadership.

This isn’t just theoretical. Fortuna Tech Labs states it’s FinCEN MSB registered (with an MSB number listed in the deck), with operational AML/KYC live, and a Wyoming money transmitter license in progress. They also describe live traction: an MVP with MonetaDEX plus an operational OTC desk, transactions executed, and early customers onboarded, with their KYC/KYB/AML stack already running.

The business model is straightforward: OTC spreads, ATM transaction fees, fiat-to-crypto conversion fees, and eventually AI compliance as SaaS. The revenue engine is transaction flow, monetized across OTC, fiat rails, and DeFi aggregation, turning volume into predictable fees and long-term enterprise value.

Right now, they’re raising a $500K-$700K pre-seed (with the option to extend higher if oversubscribed) to fund licensing and regulatory infrastructure, platform and AI development, liquidity cushion, and operations/legal. It’s milestone-driven execution, not vibes-driven fundraising, which is refreshing in crypto-adjacent anything.

Fortuna’s vision is ambitious but legible: become the compliant backbone for digital asset access, with AI as the operating layer of finance, delivered in a scalable, regulated, institutional-grade platform. If they pull it off, this is the kind of infrastructure company that quietly becomes unavoidable. The best startups don’t just ride waves. They build the docks.