Bitcoin targets private equity’s biggest weakness
Companies are staying locked up for much longer
Private equity is not facing an existential crisis. But it does have a liquidity problem large enough to explain why Nico Lechuga believes there may be an opening.
BrefCrypto has already noted that Bitcoin treasury companies are looking for new models beyond simply accumulating BTC. Orange Juice takes that logic directly into private equity.
Franklin Templeton estimates that global buyout NAV now exceeds $4 trillion. Bain, meanwhile, puts the value of investments held by private equity funds that had still not been sold at around $3.8 trillion at the end of 2025. That stock has built up after several years of difficult exits and much higher interest rates.
McKinsey reaches a similar conclusion by a different route.
More than 16,000 companies owned by buyout funds have now remained in their portfolios for more than four years. They account for 52% of the global stock of companies backed by buyout funds. The average holding period has surpassed 6.5 years.
The old model worked better when rates were low: raise a fund, buy a company using a large amount of debt, improve its results, potentially benefit from higher multiples, then sell a few years later.
The environment has turned.
The median multiple paid in acquisitions reached 11.8 times EBITDA in 2025, a record according to McKinsey. At the same time, cheap leverage and automatic multiple expansion—both of which fueled much of the previous decade’s returns—no longer do as much of the work.
Orange Juice removes the obligation to sell
Lechuga wants to remove one constraint: the exit date.
Orange Juice is structured as a permanent-capital company rather than a traditional fund with a fixed term. The company buys profitable businesses and plans to hold them indefinitely. Its launch announcement initially targets companies generating between $1 million and $10 million in annual cash flow.
An entrepreneur can sell, take part of the price in cash and retain a stake in Orange Juice. They then benefit indirectly from the group’s other acquisitions and its Bitcoin reserve.
The company also says it wants to preserve the businesses’ brands and identities. The founder can leave, remain in charge or gradually arrange a succession.
The market appears to have responded quickly: Lechuga says that more than 100 companies reached out during the first seven days, around 30 of which met the initial selection criteria.
This is still only a commercial signal, not proof that the model will work. Orange Juice does not have several decades of performance comparable to Berkshire Hathaway.
But the offering targets a current weakness in private equity: owners want to sell without necessarily seeing their company prepared for another sale five years later.
Orange Juice wants to turn cash flow into Bitcoin
Not another Strategy
The second part of the model is more unusual.
Strategy has built an enormous financial architecture around Bitcoin, using common stock, debt, preferred securities, buybacks and dollar reserves. When its cost of capital is favorable, it can raise money and buy BTC.
Orange Juice wants to work in the opposite direction.
The money must first be generated by traditional businesses: laundromats, service companies, manufacturers, distributors or other operations considered predictable enough. Some of the cash can then fund new acquisitions. Another portion goes into the Bitcoin treasury.
The group has raised $40 million to launch the strategy. Ricardo Salinas is participating as the lead investor, alongside a team that includes Lyn Alden, Jeff Booth, Andi Pitt, Nico Lechuga and Adrian Steckel. Ruben Zweiban serves as operating partner. Orange Juice is also considering a future stock-market listing.
The contrast with Bitcoin Treasury Companies is notable.
A company that depends almost entirely on financial markets can see its ability to buy BTC disappear when its stock performs poorly or credit becomes expensive. BrefCrypto has already observed this with some Bitcoin treasury companies facing the limits of their stock-market premium.
Orange Juice wants a second engine: operating earnings.
If Bitcoin falls 40%, customers will theoretically continue doing their laundry, buying industrial parts or paying for services. BTC is then no longer the only potential source of value creation.
The model still uses debt
There is, however, one essential detail that the “cash flow into Bitcoin” narrative can easily oversimplify.
In another presentation of the model, Lechuga explained that Orange Juice could also use the companies’ cash flow to support debt intended to buy Bitcoin.
His example is very specific.
Imagine a company generating $10 million in free cash flow. Orange Juice could apply roughly 2.5 to 3 times leverage to that amount and buy up to $30 million worth of BTC. At a hypothetical debt cost of 10%, around $3 million a year would go toward interest payments.
According to Lechuga, even a sharp decline in Bitcoin’s price would not necessarily cause a problem as long as the operating business continued generating enough cash to service the debt.
That is where the strategy becomes much more ambitious.
Bitcoin does not need to rise immediately for the company to pay its interest. But a recession, a poor acquisition or a sharp drop in cash flow could put the same balance sheet under pressure while BTC is going through a bear market.
Financing details will therefore matter enormously: debt maturity, collateral, covenants, fixed or variable rates, any pledging of Bitcoin and the holding company’s ability to move cash between subsidiaries.
These parameters are not yet public enough to measure the risk precisely.
Orange Juice is therefore criticizing private equity’s dependence on leverage without abandoning leverage altogether. It mainly wants to use it differently.
Can Bitcoin really improve private equity?
Returns will have to come from the companies before BTC
The model has an intellectual advantage: it arrives precisely when private equity needs to rediscover genuine sources of performance.
McKinsey estimates that, without cheap debt and easy multiple expansion, operational value creation becomes the main driver of returns. Only 6% of surveyed managers currently believe AI already has a significant impact on their operations, but 70% expect that to be the case within three to five years.
Orange Juice wants to combine the two.
The acquired companies must be improved, notably with the help of an in-house team specializing in AI. The stated objective covers productivity, automation and operational efficiency. The additional cash can then strengthen the balance sheet and buy Bitcoin.
This aspect is probably more important than BTC itself.
If Orange Juice buys a poor business at an excessive price, Bitcoin will not automatically turn the deal into a good investment. Nico Lechuga himself acknowledged this in earlier discussions about venture capital: using Bitcoin or its technology is not enough to build a good company.
The test will therefore be extremely conventional.
What price will Orange Juice pay? What quality of cash flow will it acquire? How much debt will it use? Will margins actually improve after the acquisition?
BrefCrypto recently reported Bitcoin’s major comeback in the strategies of listed companies. Orange Juice is proposing something else: start with private companies, generate cash at the source and gradually build the reserve.
Direct competition with traditional funds is still a long way off
It is therefore getting ahead of the numbers to already speak of a “$4 trillion private equity revolution.”
Orange Juice has $40 million in initial capital. Even with additional financing, the vehicle remains microscopic compared with an industry in which the value of private equity transactions reached $2.6 trillion in 2025. Global buyout transactions alone approached $1.8 trillion.
And the best traditional funds are not necessarily broken machines.
McKinsey calculates that over ten years, top-quartile buyout funds generated approximately 24% IRR, compared with a 15% total return for the S&P 500 and 13% for MSCI World. Around 70% of institutional investors surveyed in early 2026 also planned to maintain or increase their exposure to private equity.
Lechuga does not need to prove that all of private equity is broken.
He only needs to show that some entrepreneurs would rather sell to a permanent owner than to a fund with an exit date, and that combining cash flow, operational improvement and Bitcoin produces better results over a very long period.
Africa even offers a small parallel. Africa Bitcoin Corporation is already trying to combine SME financing with a Bitcoin treasury, although its structure, scale and market are entirely different.
Orange Juice’s real innovation therefore lies less in “buying Bitcoin with profits.”
Companies already do that.
It lies in trying to turn Bitcoin into a permanent capital-allocation tool inside an SME holding company, without a scheduled obligation to sell the companies generating the cash.
This is much closer to Berkshire Hathaway than to a private equity fund. The difference is that Berkshire has historically accumulated companies, stocks and cash, while Orange Juice wants to hold part of its capital in an asset whose maximum supply is fixed at 21 million units.
The bet contains a fascinating contradiction: use the stability of profitable small businesses to support Bitcoin’s volatility, then rely on Bitcoin to preserve the value created by those same businesses over the long term.
To revolutionize $4 trillion in private equity, however, it will take much more than an excellent architecture on paper.
Orange Juice will first have to buy its companies, maintain their cash flows, use leverage without weakening the balance sheet, survive a genuine Bitcoin bear market and show that its shareholders receive more than they would from a traditional fund.
Only then will Bitcoin stop being a layer added to private equity and truly become a new way to allocate capital.
