Where Finance Meets the Future of
Human and Machine Intelligence.
We build, advise, and invest at the intersection of finance, emerging technology, and the product development required to make both work at scale.
Authentica is a venture studio and advisory firm for founders, institutions, and investors who believe the next era of finance demands more than speed — it demands integrity.
Finance, Technology, and the Architecture to Make Both Last.
The next decade of finance will be shaped by three forces: the tokenization of capital markets, the rise of AI-enabled financial infrastructure, and the growing demand for transparent, accountable systems that serve people — not just institutions.
The companies that endure won't be the ones that move fastest. They'll be the ones that got the fundamentals right — sound economics, clear governance, and technology deployed with purpose.
Authentica exists to help build those companies, fund those ideas, and guide the institutions navigating that transition. AI and autonomous agents are part of this story. So are tokenized assets, digital identity, regulatory strategy, and the art of turning a good idea into a durable business.
Build. Advise. Invest.
Four Domains at the Intersection of Finance, Technology, and Product.
What We Stand For.
The Principals
A career operator at the intersection of institutional finance and on-chain infrastructure, Fred Reissman brings more than a decade of enterprise digital product leadership together with blockchain-native depth. His 11+ years at Wells Fargo as Lead Digital Product Manager were spent owning pricing and profitability platforms used daily by 5,000+ bankers — work that demanded constant translation between regulatory mandates, complex data systems, and the realities of frontline banker workflows.
That foundation in regulated, multi-stakeholder financial technology shapes how Fred approaches Authentica’s portfolio. He has built and shipped products spanning capital markets, healthcare payments, stablecoin infrastructure, and agentic payment standards — environments where compliance posture, technical architecture, and commercial viability must move in lockstep. Earlier in his career, he operated as a capital markets trader and fund manager, raising $10M for his own fund and gaining direct exposure to the mechanics of sourcing and managing institutional capital.
On the blockchain side, Fred founded TACO DAO, building one of the most active on-chain DAOs globally and developing deep fluency in tokenization, governance, and decentralized treasury operations. His work consistently sits at the seam between legacy financial infrastructure and the emerging primitives — tokenized assets, agentic rails, and AI-driven product surfaces — reshaping how value moves.
A serial entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience building and leading organizations at the intersection of regulated finance and emerging industries, Christopher “Herk” Herghelegiu has spent his career operating in the most compliance-intensive, bank-resistant verticals of the U.S. economy.
In mortgage banking, the company he built originated over $4 billion in residential financing, helping thousands of individuals and families achieve homeownership. He has since built and scaled businesses across payment processing infrastructure, blockchain/crypto tech, merchant acquiring, high-risk gateway architecture, and multi-state cannabis licensing — disciplines that demand fluency in complex regulatory frameworks, banking relationships, and operational rigor under constant scrutiny.
That ground-level experience navigating the friction points of legacy financial systems gives Herk a practitioner’s perspective on the problems blockchain and tokenization are positioned to solve. His commercial network bridges regulated financial services and frontier technology, and his work consistently focuses on translating emerging infrastructure into viable, compliant, scalable operations.
A senior software engineering leader with 25+ years delivering large-scale, performance-critical systems at the highest levels of the industry, Mats Helander operates where applied AI, distributed systems engineering, and on-chain architecture converge. As a Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft across the Office and Windows organizations, he led teams building globally deployed platform components — work shipped under the reliability, security, and performance constraints that come with serving Microsoft’s worldwide install base.
His most recent Microsoft chapter placed him inside the company’s AI product transformation, leading engineering on AI-driven products including Microsoft Copilot. That work spanned model integration, inference architecture, and the productization of generative AI inside flagship enterprise software — direct experience translating frontier model capabilities into shipping product surfaces used at scale.
Outside Microsoft, Mats has spent recent years architecting decentralized financial systems from first principles. As co-founder of Sneed DAO and TACO DAO, he designed and built on-chain protocols, token mechanics, and governance infrastructure end-to-end. That dual fluency — enterprise-scale engineering rigor combined with native blockchain protocol design — is uncommon, and it shapes how he leads technology architecture across Authentica’s portfolio.
Our Advisors
Our Methodology
Ready to Build Something
That Matters?
Whether you're tokenizing vaulted metals, building a virtual world, raising institutional capital, or navigating the frontier of digital infrastructure — we want to hear from you.