Shortly after joining a Zoom call with Eisen, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Alan Osgood had a surprise: The state of New York was holding money that belonged to me. By searching my name in a publicly available database, Osgood had discovered that I had failed to claim funds paid out by my college, likely as part of a class action lawsuit, and that money had been turned over to the state as part of a process known as escheatment. I now have to fill out forms to claim my funds. This situation is precisely why Osgood created Eisen—to ensure fewer people end up like me by unwittingly leaving their assets in a random bank account held by a U.S. state.
Eisen sells a service to financial services platforms that processes escheatments while also trying to locate customers and prevent escheatment from happening in the first place. Osgood, who previously worked as a product manager at Coinbase, is especially focused on crypto, an asset that more and more states are treating as escheatable property. Even though the amounts held can be small, the overall sum of stray funds is not: States collectively hold some $70 billion collected via escheatment, or the turning over of funds to states following a defined period of inactivity.
On Tuesday, Eisen announced that it had raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by MissionOG, which brings the startup’s total funding to $18.5 million. Eisen raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Index Ventures that has not been previously reported. First Round Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Homebrew, and Restive Ventures have also invested in Eisen.
“Across crypto, across brokerage, across fintech … all of these different places where people hold money, those companies are getting more or less extorted by the states … and then the states very, very rarely give money back to people,” Osgood told Fortune in an interview. “What Eisen is designed to do is work at the financial institution level to take in millions and millions of accounts from our clients, run them through the set of crazy state rules”—and hopefully reunite users with their funds before they go to the states.
Escheatment can be triggered when funds are not collected after someone’s death, but it can also happen for as simple a reason as a person forgetting to check their account on a financial platform. Funds must typically be dormant for 3-5 years before going to escheatment. States generally liquidate assets like stocks and crypto, and if the funds are not claimed, they sit indefinitely on the state’s balance sheet.
Eisen’s service is proving popular with the crypto industry, Osgood says, following a 2021 bull run that brought in many new users, and that could trigger a wave of escheatments. Osgood said that crypto compliance teams are “wildly underprepared” for such a scenario.
When customer funds go to escheatment, firms risk “pissing off” their users and causing them to leave the platforms entirely, Osgood said. The founder added that Eisen is tracking roughly $700 million in crypto assets that are eligible for escheatment in 2026.
A number of states, including New York and California, treat crypto as escheatable property. A potential wave of escheatments could be a growing pain in the crypto industry’s maturation, Osgood said.
“We’re going to see crypto whales get liquidated through literally no action of their own,” Osgood said. “It’s about to wash over crypto.”
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