Wences Casares
Wences Casares is a Silicon Valley–based fintech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Xapo Bank, and also founded Internet Argentina, Wanako Games, Patagon, Bling Nation, Lemon Wallet, and Banco Lemon. Casares sat on the boards of PayPal and Diem.
Early life
Casares is the eldest of four from a family of sheep ranchers in Patagonia, Argentina. In high school, Casares earned a Rotary Club scholarship as an exchange student in Washington, Pennsylvania. He returned to Buenos Aires to study business administration for three years at the University of San Andrés and dropped out to launch Argentina's first Internet service provider, Internet Argentina S.A. in 1994.He exited the company and then founded Argentine online brokerage, Patagon, in 1997. Patagon established itself as Latin America's leading comprehensive Internet financial services portal and expanded its online banking services to the United States, Spain, and Germany. Patagon was acquired by the Spanish bank, Banco Santander for $750 million and became Santander Online worldwide. Investors in Patagon included George Soros, Jorge Paulo Leman, Stephan Schmidheiny, Intel, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and entrepreneur Fred Wilson.
Career
In 2002, Casares founded Wanako Games,, a videogame developer headquartered in New York City. Wanako Games was best known for the blockbuster game Assault Heroes and was acquired by Activision in 2007. In 2002, Casares founded Banco Lemon, a bank based in Brazil, which was acquired by Banco do Brasil in 2009.Casares was the founder and CEO of Lemon Wallet, a digital wallet platform. In 2013 the American firm LifeLock bought Lemon for about $43 million.