Tzvi Wiesel and the bottle that kept coming back

The bottle had a buyer. Then it had a return address. Running a whiskey fund, Tzvi (Todd) Wiesel would send a bottle halfway around the world to a client, only to receive it again when that client wanted him to sell it. The whiskey had gone on an international excursion. Ownership, meanwhile, had accomplished something that ought to have required considerably less luggage.

Wiesel told this story while explaining the beginnings of BAXUS, the wine and spirits marketplace he co-founded with Carrie Kellar. It is an unusually helpful origin story because the inconvenience is easy to picture. A scarce bottle, carefully packed. A new owner. Another transaction. More packing. The contents remain sealed; the parcel gets all the exercise.

He had spent nearly a decade interested in whisky by the time he described this frustration in 2024. He knew the pleasures of finding a good deal and the aggravation of seeing auction prices in a market that made comparisons difficult. His question was practical: could buyers and sellers meet more directly, with clearer prices and less uncertainty?

Today, Wiesel is BAXUS’s co-founder and CEO, based in New York. He is also a whiskey reviewer. Those two occupations make a useful pair. One asks what a bottle is worth. The other asks whether the liquid deserves your attention. His working life occupies the space between them, where affection for an object meets the business of exchanging it.

A collection before a company

His route into spirits began with a production-assistant job. The collections he encountered caught his interest, and that interest became a professional trade in fine and rare bottles and casks. His career has included leading Fine & Rare bottles at Dalkeith Brokerage and serving as managing director of The Negotiation Institute. Before building a marketplace, he had worked on both the objects and the agreements surrounding them.

There is a temptation to make this résumé look inevitable. A negotiation job becomes preparation for fundraising; brokerage becomes preparation for a trading platform. Real careers are usually less obliging. What the sequence does establish is that Wiesel arrived at the software problem with experience of the transactions themselves. He had reasons to care about the paperwork because he had been doing the work.

At Columbia University, while studying computer science and databases, he launched a whiskey fund. Collecting and computing were happening in the same life. A bottle could be something to admire, an investment to manage, and an item whose record belonged in a database. The overlap would become the starting point for a partnership.

The collector’s dilemma contains a pleasing absurdity. The bottle’s eventual purpose involves opening it. Its value as a collectible can depend on keeping it closed. Every purchase therefore comes with an unspoken decision about its future: shelf, resale, or glass. A marketplace serving these owners has to accommodate all three without pretending they are the same desire.

The database class with an afterlife

Kellar met Wiesel at Columbia, where she was teaching about databases. Her experience included work on The New York Times’ machine-learning platform team. He brought the spirits market; she brought a technical background suited to examining how its information was organized. Together, they saw an industry whose transactions could benefit from better records.

Their company’s public launch came in October 2023. Even its name carried Wiesel’s two interests. BAXUS was a technology-friendly variation on Bacchus, the god associated with wine. Antiquity supplied the reference. A startup supplied the spelling. Somewhere between the two sits a fairly accurate description of the enterprise.

The partnership also complicates the familiar portrait of a founder with one idea and a laptop. This business needs people who understand authentication, storage, collectors, and software. Wiesel’s expertise alone cannot provide all of that. Kellar’s contribution is central to how his trading frustration became something other people could use.

When BAXUS announced its $5 million seed round in May 2024, Wiesel used his public celebration to thank her and the friends and family who had supported the previous three years. He called Kellar “the brain behind the cutting-edge technology”. The acknowledgment is more revealing than a polished account of solitary persistence. His account of the company includes a crowd.

Let the ownership travel

BAXUS gives the bottle a place to stay while its ownership changes. Sellers submit physical bottles for authentication and vault storage. The bottles are scanned, and a digital token represents each one. A buyer can retain it in custody or request delivery. The record can move between owners while the glass remains on a shelf.

For Wiesel, that arrangement addresses the round trip that irritated him as a fund operator. It also changes what a distant buyer can examine. The listing concerns a particular object with a recorded identity, rather than only the name of a release. A collector cares about the item being purchased, not merely the existence of similar items elsewhere.

The marketplace is built on Solana. Its payment options have included credit cards and bank transfers alongside cryptocurrency and USDC. That choice matters to the personal story: a wine enthusiast does not have to become a blockchain enthusiast before taking an interest in a bottle. The company’s audience can share an appetite without sharing a technical vocabulary.

A digital record still needs its physical counterpart. Authentication happens around the bottle; storage happens in a building. The quality of the service depends on those ordinary operations as well as the software. Wiesel’s business therefore brings together two kinds of precision: the record on a network and the object in somebody’s care. Neither can sensibly be treated as decoration.

A tasting in Brooklyn, a sale on a screen

In June 2025, Wiesel invited crypto journalist Jack Kubinec to a private Clase Azul tasting and bottle launch in Brooklyn. Kubinec bought a limited-edition tequila for $2,000. Wiesel took it away for scanning and listing on BAXUS. An attempt to sell at $3,500 went nowhere; a $3,000 price found a buyer. After fees, the journalist reported a $700 profit.

The small episode gives the model a recognizable shape. There was an event, an actual bottle, a seller who had to choose a price, and a buyer willing to pay it. The chain did not persuade somebody to accept the first asking price. It provided a way to complete the eventual transaction without sending the bottle on another tour.

That distinction keeps the story grounded. Better trading arrangements do not establish what a collectible ought to be worth. Buyers still have preferences. Sellers still have expectations. Sometimes the two agree after an adjustment. Even with a token attached, a bottle retains the old commercial talent for disappointing its owner’s first estimate.

Wiesel remains close to the tasting side of this world. He heads the US reviews team at The Whiskey Wash, where his published work ranges across bourbon, Scotch, Japanese whisky, and other categories. In early 2025, his reviews included Octomore 15.2, a 26-year-old Mars Komagatake, and a Wyoming Whiskey single barrel. The range gives his public work texture beyond the founder title.

“Don’t scale irresponsibly, the next round of funding is never guaranteed.”Tzvi Wiesel, May 2024

The cellar gets a balance sheet

The seed round brought in Multicoin Capital as lead investor, with Solana Ventures, Narwhal Ventures, FJ Labs, and angel investors participating. BAXUS said the money would support sensor and vaulting technology. Those are telling priorities for a company associated with digital ownership: some of its next work involved improving its ability to look after physical things.

By 2026, Wiesel’s ambitions extended beyond bottle sales. In a June conversation with Alex Kehaya, he discussed barrel tokenization, lending, asset verification, and the company’s whiskey vending-machine experience. These projects follow different routes into the same question of how a physical collection can connect to a digital market.

Strobe Ventures, a BAXUS investor, reported $50 million in marketplace gross merchandise value for 2025 and $5 million in lending originations. Those figures describe activity through the business, rather than its revenue or Wiesel’s personal wealth. They give a sense of the scale at which the original shipping complaint has developed.

The company also acquired collection-tracking app BoozApp in late 2023. Its barrel-monitoring business, Athyna, uses sensors on the Helium network to collect information from rickhouses. To follow Wiesel’s ambitions now is to move between a collector’s phone and a warehouse full of maturing spirits. A bottle on a shelf is only one part of the picture.

Lending introduces another decision for an owner: keep the collection and borrow against it. Barrel monitoring moves further upstream, toward spirits that have yet to reach a bottle. Both demand reliable knowledge about physical assets. The larger the ambition becomes, the more the business returns to storage, identity, condition, and the people responsible for checking them.

Still a person with a palate

Asked for his favorite New York restaurant in 2024, Wiesel said he rarely ate at restaurants but could offer a list of bars. The answer has the economy of somebody who knows where his interests lie. Alongside funds, databases, and fundraising sits a more straightforward enthusiasm: he likes this world enough to keep exploring it.

His public appearances range from technology podcasts to a tasting with Fred Minnick. That variety puts him among people who approach the same bottle with different questions. A developer wants to know how ownership is recorded. A collector wants to know what is available. A reviewer wants to know what happens after the cork comes out. Wiesel has reasons to remain in each conversation.

BAXUS’s direction can be described in financial terms, but the original story is still a useful measure of it. Does a transaction become easier for the people involved? Can the owner make a decision without arranging another unnecessary journey? Can information follow an object that may sit still for years? Those questions survive every change in terminology.

Wiesel started with a bottle that kept coming back. The business he is building offers it a different itinerary: arrive, be examined, find a secure place, and stay there until somebody wants it delivered. Ownership can have the busy life. The whiskey can wait. For a product already accustomed to patience, that seems a rather civilized arrangement.