Now investing in frontier technologies through Inventive Capital, Zee Wang is applying lessons from building CoinClan, where he automated roughly 90% of manual workflows before leading the company through its 2025 acquisition by PayAtom.

In CoinClan’s early years, Zee Wang personally handled nearly every step of a customer transaction. As the company grew from a founder-led operation into an international crypto business, he handled customer service, trade settlement, compliance, hedging, banking relationships, and coin releases. The workload eventually forced a question that would shape much of the company’s development: which parts of the operation could become systems instead of continuing to depend on him.

By the time PayAtom acquired CoinClan in 2025, the company had processed more than $800 million in cumulative transaction volume, served customers across more than 30 countries, and grown to a distributed team of more than 50 people. Zee estimates that roughly 90% of the company’s manual workflows had been automated by its later stages.

The acquisition itself became another founder-led project. Zee says he responded when PayAtom first approached the company, made an offer, negotiated the agreement, and traveled to meet the buyer after a deposit was paid. He then handled the finalization of the sale and the handover.

PayAtom was particularly interested in infrastructure CoinClan had assembled across multiple markets. Zee identifies banking rails and regulatory licenses & authorizations covering Lithuania and Poland in the European Union, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates. The buyer wanted to use that infrastructure to support customers moving between traditional currencies and cryptocurrency.

That interest reflected years of work behind the customer-facing product. CoinClan’s transactions required identity verification, payment matching, compliance records, settlement, and hedging with liquidity providers. Zee had handled many of those responsibilities manually when the company was small, then designed processes that could absorb more of the work as transaction volume increased.

“If the business grows but every increase in volume requires the same increase in manual work, you have not really solved the scaling problem,” Zee says. “I wanted the systems to absorb more of the routine work so the team could focus on the exceptions and the decisions that actually needed people.”

One of Zee’s more distinctive systems addressed the risk around releasing cryptocurrency to customers. An incorrect release could create an immediate financial loss, while a compromised process could expose assets held in the company’s wallet. Zee designed a mechanism he called “safety scores,” a multi-user approval process in which a transaction could be released only after the combined approval score reached a required threshold.

The system reflected the balance Zee was trying to establish across CoinClan. Automation needed to reduce repetitive work without turning sensitive financial decisions into unguarded automated actions. Some processes could move faster with software, while others still required controls that distributed responsibility across multiple people.

The broader automation effort changed Zee’s own role as well. Customer service was one of the responsibilities he initially handled himself before other team members took it over. Trade tallies, coin releases, hedging, and other recurring work also moved into formalized processes. Zee estimates that the changes ultimately removed more than eight hours of his own daily workload.

As the company became less dependent on him for individual transactions, his attention shifted toward product design, international expansion, regulatory work, and the systems required to keep a larger organization operating.

The company continued expanding market by market. By the later stages of Zee’s tenure, CoinClan was operating across more than 30 countries. The combination of banking access, regulatory authorizations, customer demand, and internal operating systems became part of what PayAtom ultimately acquired.

The deal also marked a transition in Zee’s own work. After the acquisition, he founded Inventive Capital and began investing his own capital in emerging technologies. His current investment approach is shaped in part by what he learned while operating CoinClan: an impressive technology still has to function inside a business whose processes can hold up as customers, transactions, and complexity increase.

That experience has made scalability one of the questions Zee brings to new investments. He looks at whether a product solves a meaningful problem, but also at what has to exist around the product for a company to keep delivering as demand grows. His interest now extends across artificial intelligence, longevity, blockchain, and other frontier technologies.

The connection to CoinClan is practical. Zee spent years turning work he once performed himself into processes that other people or software could execute. The result was a company that could handle substantially greater transaction volume without requiring each new trade to create the same amount of manual effort.

The acquisition gave that work an external test. According to Zee, PayAtom was particularly interested in the banking rails and regulatory infrastructure CoinClan had assembled across multiple jurisdictions, along with the operating capability behind its crypto on-ramp and off-ramp business.

Zee is now looking at companies from the other side of the table. Instead of building every system himself, he is deciding which founders and technologies deserve investment and whether the businesses around them can withstand the pressure that comes with growth.

“A business has to keep working when there is more volume, more complexity, and more people involved,” Zee says. “Building that operating system was a big part of what I learned at CoinClan.”

Through Inventive Capital, that lesson has become part of Zee’s current investment thesis. The next bet is no longer only about what a new technology can do. It is whether the company behind it can keep working once people actually start using it.