upshift
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Alexandre Elkrief
He managed institutional crypto positions on spreadsheets and assumptions, then watched the market blow up. Now he is trying to rebuild the plumbing so it can't happen the same way twice.
August Digital
August Digital is a New York-based institutional crypto company building on-chain prime brokerage infrastructure. Its platform gives trading desks, funds, protocols and treasuries secure smart-contract accounts, real-time risk and pricing engines, cross-margining, lending, and structured products so they can borrow, lend, trade and settle across DeFi and CeFi with any liquid collateral - all with on-chain auditability. August also operates Upshift, a vault product that opens institutional-grade yield strategies to a wider set of users. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Dragonfly in March 2025 and reports having processed roughly $45B in cumulative volume.
Ezra Goldman
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.