Hey everyone 👋

We're Sam and Michael, co-founders of Palus Finance.

TL;DR: Palus gives startups and SMBs access to institutional-grade bond portfolios, earning up to 50% more yields than money market funds with comparable safety and near-immediate liquidity.

Instead of replacing your bank, we plug into it, so you can spend five minutes optimizing your treasury and get back to building.

👉 Ask: If your startup has idle cash earning money market rates, we'd love to show you what you're leaving on the table. Sign up at palus.finance or reach out at founders@palus.finance.

Our launch video: https://youtu.be/tOXypVV3Czc

The Problem

After a fundraise, startups park 18–24 months of cash in a money market fund and draw it down gradually. That cash sits there for months or years, earning roughly 3.5%, because every existing treasury product does the same thing: sweep your cash into a money market fund and charge a management fee.

Money market funds are the lowest rung of what's available in fixed income. They're safe and liquid, but you're paying for same-day liquidity on cash you won't touch for six months. Fortune 500 companies don't do this; they have treasury teams that actively invest in a range of safe, higher-yielding assets. But those strategies have always required dedicated treasury operations, and founders don't have time to be portfolio managers.

It turns out, a good yield strategy can have a real impact. On a $10M balance, the difference between 3.5% and 5% is $150K per year.

That can mean an extra engineer. Less dilution for founders. Or if it comes down to it, weeks of extra runway that can literally save your company.

That kind of impact is worth five minutes of your time. We make it that quick.

The Solution

Palus replaces the default money market fund with a bond portfolio specifically optimized for startup treasuries, targeting 4.5–5% returns with equivalent safety and 1–2 day withdrawal times. In other words, by giving up a couple days of liquidity on cash you won’t need for months, you can get up to 50% more yield on your treasury.

We're the only startup treasury product with a differentiated investment strategy. Everyone else is just a wrapper on a money market fund.

We think that startup banking products themselves (Brex, Mercury, etc.) are genuinely great at what they do: payments, payroll, card management. But it turns out their great bank product is bundled with a crappy treasury one. So rather than building another neobank, we built Palus to connect to your existing bank account via Plaid. Our goal was to create the simplest possible UX for this product: two buttons and a number that goes up.

Yes, this is what it actually looks like.

The Backstory

When we joined YC, like all our peers, we were bombarded by emails from every startup bank, asking us to put money in their treasury platform. But then we realized all these products are just some elegant branding on a money market fund.

Sam comes from a finance background, so the status quo felt strange: startups were defaulting into the lowest-yielding safe asset in fixed income, simply because no one had built an easy way for them to access anything better (there is actually one widely-advertised treasury product that claims to offer higher yields, but instead of an MMF it uses a mutual fund where your principal is at considerable risk; it had a 9% loss in 2022 that took years to recover).

And it's personal. We’ve seen friends’ startups try to stretch every last dollar of runway, hoping to buy just a few more weeks to close a round. A better yield on their reserves could have given them breathing room when it mattered most. That's the kind of margin we're building for.

So after talking to hundreds of founders, our mission was clear: create something that lets them easily access institutional-grade yields, so they can focus on building.

The Ask

If your startup has cash sitting in a money market fund, sign up at palus.finance and see how much more you could be earning. Setup takes minutes.

Know a founder or CFO managing idle cash? Send them our way: founders@palus.finance.

Reach out if you have any questions: we love talking about this stuff, helping founders manage their money, and making finance less confusing for people.

The Team

Sam Lushtak (CEO): Previously built an investment research platform for an asset manager with over $3T AUM. Caltech alum. Sharpe ratio enthusiast.

Michael Gonzalez (CTO): Wrote monitoring software that saved defense contractors $150M+ by optimizing uptime of multi-site quantum computing fleets. Caltech alum. Distributed systems nerd.

See Palus in action here: https://youtu.be/8Q_gwSqtnxM

This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Yields and spreads referenced are approximate and based on historical data.