Annabelle Huang, co-founder and CEO of Altius Labs, said the company was shaped by two defining experiences from her time at Amber Group: the fallout from the FTX collapse and the death of her longtime friend Tiantian Kullander, known as TT. Altius has raised $11 million in pre-seed funding, and Huang said the company is being built with a much leaner structure, with around 10 people on the team.
Amber’s boom-and-bust years changed how she builds
In the interview, Huang looked back at Amber Group’s rapid growth from 2018 through 2021 and 2022. She described a period marked by aggressive investing, sponsorships, and hiring, adding that the company expanded too quickly. The FTX collapse in 2022, she said, acted as a form of shock therapy. After the crash, she stayed to help rebuild Amber and bring it back toward revenue generation and profitability before leaving to start Altius.
That period left a clear mark on her operating style. Huang said Altius is being run more conservatively, without chasing expansion for its own sake. With AI tools improving output per employee, she said, a small group of high-performing people who can work across functions is more useful than a large headcount.
TT’s death pushed her back toward building infrastructure
Huang also spoke about the impact of Kullander’s death, calling it one of the hardest moments of her life. It came during Amber’s worst week, and she said it forced a broader reassessment of what she wanted to build in crypto.
She said her original reason for leaving traditional finance was to help build DeFi. Later, as she reassessed the market, she came to believe that institutional services and liquidity provision had become crowded areas, and that liquidity was no longer the main bottleneck for on-chain adoption. Infrastructure performance looked like the more urgent gap. That view led her to focus on systems that could support future use cases such as high-frequency trading, payments, and other blockchain-based applications.
Altius is positioning itself as an execution layer, not a new chain
Huang described Altius as an execution layer that can be inserted into blockchains to improve performance. The company is not trying to launch its own L1 or L2. Instead, it wants to package its crypto infrastructure experience into a stack that helps existing chains or new projects deploy high-performance systems much faster.
Her pitch is centered on build time. Rather than requiring years to develop a high-performance blockchain environment, Huang said the aim is to let teams get the infrastructure they need running within weeks. She said the target users include financial institutions, enterprises, and future machine-driven transaction networks such as AI agent-to-agent activity.
Open-source code alone is not the full product
On the tension between Web3’s open-source culture and the proprietary mindset common in banking and quantitative trading, Huang said the adjustment has been real for both her and Altius’ CTO, who spent 15 years at Hudson River Trading. Still, she argued that open code does not erase execution difficulty.
In her view, even if a standard open-source stack is available, teams without native blockchain or distributed systems expertise may not know how to deploy or use it properly. She compared the opportunity to the freemium model common in Web2: the base layer can remain open, while enterprise-grade deployments and managed services can still become a paid offering.
Her focus is on purpose-built chains tied to actual applications
Huang drew a distinction between technical benchmarks and market demand. When Altius talks about nanosecond-level performance or parallel execution, she said, the point is not to argue for more general-purpose high-throughput chains. It is to show partner teams what can be achieved with the company’s technology.
She said more of Altius’ counterparties are purpose-built teams that already have an application and want to launch an app chain tailored to it. In her view, the market does not need another wave of generic high-performance blockchains. What it needs are specialized chains designed around specific use cases, with infrastructure tuned to those requirements.