Maximilian Fiege

Maximilian “Max” Fiege is the founder and principal of Merenti Capital, a Swiss, principal-led family office investing its own balance sheet across liquid strategies, direct investments, and commitments to specialist funds. Merenti has no outside investors.

Merenti’s capital base grew from concentrated, high-conviction investments in exceptional founders and emerging networks, maintained through periods of significant volatility. That history informs Max’s preference for independent judgment, patient ownership, and relationships capable of compounding over many years rather than conforming to a predetermined fund cycle.

Max has spent nearly a decade immersed in decentralized finance at the intersection of technology, markets, and regulation—as an investor, advisor, and founder. He co-founded Native Markets, which built and operated USDH, a network-integrated stablecoin for Hyperliquid. In 2026, Native Markets agreed to grant Coinbase rights to purchase the USDH brand assets as Coinbase became the official issuer of USDC on Hyperliquid. Max has also advised a U.S.-listed company on digital-asset treasury architecture, stakeholder education, and ecosystem strategy.

These experiences shaped a systems-oriented investment lens. Max believes emerging technologies are rarely underwritten on technical merit alone: incentive design, distribution, market structure, governance, regulation, and balance-sheet durability all influence whether an innovation can survive, earn trust, and compound. He therefore spends as much time considering paths to adoption and value capture as he does the underlying product.

Digital financial infrastructure remains his deepest area of experience, but he approaches Merenti as a generalist willing to become a specialist when a system, founder, or manager warrants sustained attention.

For founders, Max is most drawn to people with earned insight, intellectual independence, unusually high personal ownership, and candor about what remains unknown. Merenti is deliberately selective and is not structured like a conventional venture fund. When the fit is strong, it can pair capital with time, experience, and network without the constraints of external fundraising cycles, portfolio-construction mandates, or pressure to deploy according to a fixed schedule.

Max is particularly comfortable working through questions involving market design, product sequencing, capital formation, regulatory framing, and the transition from an early technical or community-led wedge into a durable institution. His objective is not to prescribe how a company should be built, but to be a thoughtful and aligned counterparty when a founder encounters consequential decisions.

Merenti also commits capital to investment funds, with particular interest in emerging managers. Max looks for a clearly bounded and defensible edge, meaningful alignment, thoughtful portfolio construction, capacity discipline, and direct communication about both results and uncertainty. He is especially interested in managers seeking to build an enduring investment practice rather than simply an asset-gathering business, and in relationships through which both manager and allocator can learn over time.

Max is a graduate of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and is based in Switzerland. He works with founders and managers globally.