In April 2022, Patrick Mrozowski’s San Francisco debit-card startup Point seemed destined for failure. The three-year-old fintech, which offered cash-back rewards on everyday purchases, had a small, shrinking user base and was preparing to overhaul its product. It faced a ballooning set of competitors bolstered by the 2021 fintech funding frenzy.

Then it received dire news from its most important business partner, Column, an FDIC-insured bank owned by billionaire William Hockey that provided the infrastructure for Point to issue debit cards. Column was pulling the plug on their agreement amid rising regulatory scrutiny of bank-fintech partnerships, which meant every active consumer account Point had created would be closed.

“We lost every single customer we had,” the 30-year-old CEO says today, speaking from a Greenwich Village coffee shop near his startup’s New York office. It was the second time Mrozowski had lost a bank partner in a year, and it meant he would have to delay his upcoming product revamp indefinitely. In February 2023, Point made Forbes’ list of 25 struggling, zombie fintechs, indicating that its survival was in question. Mrozowski says he tries not to think too much about that era of his life, and some of the details are hazy. “It's almost like PTSD, where traumatic parts of your memory are erased.”

But he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. A Point data scientist had found that 90% of its card transactions came from 15% of its customers. The analysis showed that Mrozowski had been wasting money marketing to and serving a mass audience that wasn’t particularly valuable to his business.

He realized few startups were focusing on the uppermost echelon of the consumer finance market, and he knew he needed a different hook to attract the ultrawealthy. These customers didn’t care much about cash back or points. “What they care about is access to the best restaurants. They care about service. They just care about things being frictionless and seamless,” Mrozowski says.

Between late 2021 and late 2023, Mrozowski decided a restructuring and rebranding were in order, so he laid off more than one-third of his staff and renamed his company Atlas. He landed a bank partnership with Jackie Reses’ Kansas City-based Lead Bank and moved to New York. Mrozowski had heard people complain about how they didn’t find American Express’ concierge services for its Platinum and Black (Centurion) cards useful, so he created a text-message-based concierge for people to book travel plans and restaurant reservations.

In August 2023, Mrozowski fully relaunched Atlas as a high-end charge card costing $999 a year. The sleek new card, made of steel and polished to a mirror finish, weighs 21 grams, or four times more than a typical plastic card. It was offered by “invite-only” and advertised as “Your key to the world.”

Today, his 2,000 customers text the Atlas concierge to reserve private jets, hotels in Turks and Caicos and meals at New York hotspots like The Corner Store and Torrisi. Billionaire tech entrepreneur Lucy Guo says she uses Atlas more than any other credit card and spends up to $2 million a month on it. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been a cardholder, too, and is an Atlas investor (a spokesperson for Schmidt declined to comment).

Though Atlas has entered a fiercely competitive segment of the market long dominated by American Express and other giants like JPMorgan Chase, the startup is growing rapidly. Its gross revenue run-rate is now more than $20 million, and it just closed a new $40 million Series C fundraise at a $420 million valuation. Solo venture capitalist Elad Gil and Verified Capital led the new financing, and Marathon and Dick Costolo’s 01 Advisors also contributed.

“[Mrozowski] beat his head against the wall at Point for five years,” says Marathon’s Michael Gilroy. Gilroy was surprised that Mrozowski “still had all this energy bottled up” when they started investment conversations in 2024. Mrozowski says today, “They don't tell you how long it takes for the company to actually start working when you start. It's always a lot longer than you expect.”

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Born to Polish immigrants, Patrick Mrozowski and his twin brother Martin grew up in Santa Cruz, just south of Silicon Valley. Their dad owned a series of small businesses, including some that produced CD-ROM and DVD movies and bought distribution rights to Polish films and sold them to Netflix. Mrozowski’s mom was a nurse. Patrick says his twin, who’s now launching his own AI travel startup called Miso, was always taller and more popular. “I kind of felt like I was like the underdog.”

Patrick admired tech entrepreneurs as a kid and was accepted to the University of California at Santa Cruz, but instead of going to school, he launched his own fintech called Crumbs in 2016 at age 19. Crumbs was an investing app that turned spare change into bitcoin. Two years later, it was acquired by larger crypto startup Metal for less than $3 million, Mrozowski says. He founded Point the next year with software engineer Kenan Pulak and designer Sid Parihar, and the trio secured $47 million in funding and a valuation of $275 million at the height of the fintech bubble, in September 2021. Over the next three years, the debit-card startup burned through cash but produced little in the way of revenue.

Point’s rebirth as Atlas has been a lesson in high-touch service for Mrozowski. The CEO has personally held more than 1,000 onboarding calls with new users to learn their preferences and explain how Atlas works. Atlas uses AI models from OpenAI and Google to summarize user requests, draft responses, build customer profiles and make personalized recommendations. It has 40 full time employees and a concierge team of 20 contractors based in Europe and the U.S. who handle customer inquiries.

To secure tables at trendy restaurants for his cardholders, Mrozowski tells restaurants that Atlas users are big spenders. In some cases, Atlas pays restaurants for access to tables. It also has a travel agent business model: It earns commissions from hotels and airlines for booking customer reservations. For an additional $500 fee, it lets cardholders have multiple cards with pre-set limits that they can give to other family members, house managers or nannies.

Atlas says that so far, it has retained 80% of its customers after they’ve been cardholders for a year and 70% after two years. Lucy Guo says she was initially skeptical of Atlas because it doesn’t offer as many points or rewards as her other card, the ultraexclusive JPMorgan Reserve, which reportedly requires people to hold assets of at least $10 million at JPMorgan’s private bank to qualify. Atlas’ concierge service eventually made her think the card was worth the steep annual fee, which the company maintains in lieu of a high asset balance.

Given its tiny customer base, Atlas is a long way away from breaking even or even building a sustainable business. The perks and benefits available to the millions holding American Express Platinum and Centurion cards, including posh airport lounges and merchant credits from retailers like Lululemon and Saks, dwarf those offered by Atlas today. Mrozowski doesn’t try to compete with Amex and JPMorgan’s generous rewards and credits, opting instead to focus on Atlas’ concierge service.

It’s hard to tell whether Mrozowski’s relaunch as Atlas will be a long-term survivor. He says his target customers are Amex Centurion and JPMorgan Reserve cardholders who spend $500,000 or more annually on their cards. Even so, if Atlas attracts a mere 10,000 users who hit his spending target on their Atlas cards, he’ll make $100 million in gross revenue on 2% interchange fees alone. Stay tuned.

© Forbes