Vaulta — AUM Model

Consumer money management on-chain · interest-bearing checking + cheaper merchant rails + tokenized investing

① Balances

Consumer earns 3.84% on their whole balance. Chime pays 0% on checking — this is the structural difference and the reason balances here should exceed Chime's.
Share of a month's collections a merchant parks with Vaulta. Vaulta keeps a 30% sleeve on it, the merchant gets 3.36%.

② Payments — "0.5% + cost"

Charged on every payment whatever the rail.
Vaulta is the issuer, so this is revenue. Requires a Durbin-exempt sponsor bank — Chime runs 1.2–1.8% this way. On a Rain-style programme it would be ~0.35%.
Merchant pays 0.50% on QR vs 2.00% on card, against ~2.5–2.9% at Stripe. QR is cheaper for them and worth less to us — an acquisition tool, not a revenue line.

③ Investing

Betterment and Wealthfront both charge 0.25%.
S&P historical ~10.4%; forward forecasts 4–6%.
Withdrawals plus leavers who liquidate.

④ Costs

Infrastructure plus support.
Fixed operating cost is built from headcount on the Team tab. Marketing is CAC × gross adds. Derived by stage:
Seed
—
Ser A
—
Ser B
—
Ser C
—

⑤ Valuation

Used for both the DCF and LTV.
Enterprise Value
—
DCF + terminal
Risk-Adjusted EV
—
× survival × stage
Revenue / Customer
—
per year
LTV : CAC
—
target ≥ 3x
EBITDA Positive
—
first positive year
CAC Payback
—
months

Revenue & EBITDA ($M)

Revenue by Line ($M)

Customers by Segment (000s)

Total AUM vs Wallet Balances ($M)

Summary by Year

Customer Profiles

Seven inputs per segment. Marketing expense is CAC × gross adds and nothing else.

Segments

Spend is a dollar amount per month so it can be compared directly with Chime's ~$970. Churn is the mature monthly rate; year-one churn is a multiple of it, set globally below.

Growth by stage (annual %)

Seed = Year 1 · Series A = Years 2–3 · Series B = Years 4–6 · Series C = Years 7–10. A segment with zero seed customers starts when its first non-zero growth stage begins, using the entry column.

Customers by year

Unit Economics

Revenue per customer per month, by source, and the LTV that follows.

Per customer per month — Year 5

Blended by year

Sensitivity — enterprise value

Each cell re-runs the whole ten years.

P&L, Cash & Valuation

Profit & Loss

Cash & funding

Valuation

Team & Fixed Cost

The org plan behind the fixed operating cost line. Everything here is editable and flows straight into the P&L.

Headcount by function and stage

Annual salary by function

Non-payroll fixed cost by stage ($M/yr)

G&A, legal retainer, compliance and audit, fixed infrastructure, and international licensing.

Derived fixed operating cost

Sanity check against comparables: Chime runs roughly $254 of opex per member per year, Wealthfront about $138. A business riding Dinari's rails rather than running its own broker-dealer should sit below both.

Benchmarks & Sources

Researched September 2026. Every default traces to one of these.

The three business models

Neither comparable earns most of its money from the thing it is named for. Chime is 69% interchange; Wealthfront is 74% deposit spread. The 0.25% advisory fee is a quarter of Wealthfront's revenue even though its clients hold $26,071 of invested assets.

Sources

Findings