[2] The Beenz management team raised almost $100 million from venture capitalists including Apax Patricof, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Michael Saylor of Microstrategy, François Pinault of PPR, Vivendi Universal, Italian financier Carlo de Benedetti and Hikari Tsushin of Japan.

Beenz's offices in London were visited by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) on suspicion of operating an unlicensed bank.

[3] Beenz operated in the United States, Sweden, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Australia and China.

[citation needed] After the dot-com bubble burst, the company replaced its CEO, Philip Letts, with a team including the founder, Charles Cohen, and other Board directors Stephen Limpe, Don McGuire and Sean Lane.

[citation needed] Carlson planned to integrate the beenz system into the customer relationship management tools they offered to clients.

He co-founded the parent company and joined forces with former reality television star Neil Forrester, whom Cohen had met whilst the pair were students at Oxford University.

Letts left Beenz after closing the last big round of over 30 million and went on to run Tradaq.com, a business-to-business exchange that allowed companies to buy and sell products and services without using cash.

Initially, the concept was heavily dependent on the English-speaking world and to change that the company recruited such characters as the Swedish entrepreneur Mikael Karlmark to launch its first non-English subsidiary.

However, at the time, this was fraught with difficulty, as some countries (such as France) expressed a view that such alternative currency schemes were undesirable and that they would seek to prevent them from operating.