Inversion
A private equity firm that acquires traditional businesses and embeds blockchain
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About Inversion
Inversion Capital is an investment vehicle that advocates buying traditional low-margin businesses and replacing their underlying infrastructure, targeting mature sectors like telecom and payments. It addresses the low efficiency of cash flow and distribution in legacy firms by embedding Stablecoin, on-chain settlement and tokenization into existing operations so the blockchain runs invisibly in the background. Its model resembles a leveraged buyout but creates value through on-chain settlement rather than financial engineering, with target assets concentrated in Mexican and Brazilian telecom and payments.
Inversion's central uncertainty is that its thesis depends on actually closing acquisitions of Latin American traditional firms, and no such deal has yet been publicly completed as proof. The synergy between its on-chain settlement and portfolio companies also presupposes real control and restructuring, so its use case is limited to mature enterprises willing to accept on-chain rebuild, carrying higher execution risk than a pure technology play.
In November 2024 former ParaFi partner Santiago Roel Santos founded Inversion Capital, arguing for acquiring traditional low-margin businesses and replacing their underlying infrastructure.
In February 2025 Inversion said it would build a custom L1 on Avalanche to serve as the shared operating system and settlement layer for its portfolio companies.
In the second quarter of 2025 Inversion became Helium's second authorized service provider, planning to consolidate Latin American mobile virtual network operators.
On September 8, 2025 Inversion raised a $26.5 million seed led by Dragonfly with ParaFi, VanEck, HashKey and Wintermute, at a valuation of about $100 million.
Inversion's model is compared to 1980s leveraged buyouts, except it creates value through stablecoins, onchain settlement and tokenization rather than financial engineering.
In April 2026 founder Santos laid out the strategy at TOKEN2049 Dubai: buy distribution that already has users, then let blockchain run invisibly in the background.
Inversion's first acquisition targets are telecom and payments assets in Mexico and Brazil, but no deal has been publicly closed, leaving execution risk its central uncertainty.
In February 2026, Inversion Labs released a public payment-cost calculator quantifying the financial impact of inefficient payment infrastructure through churn and settlement friction; the firm had earlier said it would build its own Avalanche L1 as a common settlement and identity layer for acquired companies, citing permissioning at validator, contract and transaction level plus privacy and custom gas tokens.
In the second half of 2026, Inversion founder Santiago Roel Santos conceded in a shareholder letter and on the Empire podcast that the founding hypothesis, that buying traditional businesses and embedding crypto would produce above-market returns, remained unproven after eight months across more than 20 sectors: MVNO unit economics were poor, onchain B2B borrowing actually cost 8–12% and could not beat traditional finance, and remittances were stuck on stakeholder incentives rather than technology. The firm pivoted to a holding-company model of quality cash-generating businesses where AI or crypto acts as an enhancement.
Inversion applies private-equity buyout logic on-chain: with 26.5 million dollars from its seed round it acquires low-margin telecom and financial services businesses that already have distribution, then replaces their back office with stablecoin and on-chain settlement, so returns come from operating improvement rather than token appreciation. The permissioned Avalanche L1 is not a public chain for outsiders but the shared settlement and identity layer for portfolio companies, tying its value directly to their cash flow. The bottleneck sits in the same place: the more traditional the target, the slower the integration and compliance retrofit, and valuation can only be read on operating metrics rather than deposits, leaving deal pace constrained by capital rather than technology.
Santiago Roel Santos: founder and CEO, founded Inversion in 2024; graduated magna cum laude in economics from Boston University; joined JPMorgan's investment banking financial sponsors group in 2012, later held roles at Sageview Capital and was a partner at ParaFi Capital, investing in more than 150 crypto companies, and co-hosted Blockworks' Empire podcast.
Suzanne Dannheim: co-founder and COO, joined in 2025; holds a BS in finance and computer science from George Washington University and joined Goldman Sachs in 2019, serving as an emerging-markets FX trader and later head of digital-asset projects, strategy and distribution.
George Calle: head of research, formerly VP and head of research and data at The Block and market intelligence lead at R3.
Adam Wyatt: head of backer relations, responsible for fund affairs and backer communication.
The team is centered on investing and research, with members drawn from Santos's ParaFi-era network; Dannheim owns operations and people, Calle leads research, and Wyatt's backer affairs report directly to Santos.