TRWD Just Sold Its First License Into A $30+ Billion Market
Every time a customer taps a card, the companies running that payment take a small cut, and collecting it across millions of transactions is how payment companies grew into some of the largest businesses in finance. Inside gentlemen's clubs, a growing share of the night's spending now skips that system entirely, sent from customer to entertainer through apps like Venmo and Cash App, meaning the venue sees none of it. Tradewinds Universal (OTCID: $TRWD) has acquired a platform that pulls that money back inside the club, running the payment from customer to entertainer through its own system so the venue keeps its fee and the company takes a cut of its own. Payment companies grew by getting their system into as many places as possible, and TRWD is spreading its platform the same way, starting with a licensee that signed on with a $50,000 non-refundable deposit to take it into Latin American nightlife.
Venues under that license get a system where the customer messages an entertainer, pays inside the same conversation, and the club's fee comes out first. It is the newest piece of a financial services division built around the ATMs and card terminals clubs already run, where the company pegs surcharges alone at around $100,000 a year for an established venue. Across 20 venues that one line comes to roughly $2 million a year, before a single card swipe or chat payment is counted. Whether a customer pays with the cash in his wallet or the phone in his pocket, that division is built to collect on the transaction.
A cut of club spending grows with the number of clubs paying it, and until September the company's only way to add clubs was to buy them one at a time on the road to a 100-venue goal. Licensing opened a second road, letting operators with no interest in selling plug the technology into their own venues. The Latin American agreement pays TRWD a negotiated percentage of revenue from every venue the licensee signs, the first territory in a global nightlife market sized at $30.16 billion in 2026. Each of those venues adds to the cut without a club changing hands, and a network built that way grows faster than any acquisition budget allows.
Every club the platform reaches is up against the same competitor, and IBISWorld, which puts America's strip club industry at $4.2 billion in 2026, names OnlyFans among the platforms pulling performers out of physical clubs. OnlyFans runs on fans paying performers directly from their phones, and Architect Capital paid $535 million in May for about 16% of it, valuing the company near $3.15 billion. TRWD, with a market cap of under $2.2 million, is putting that same phone-to-performer payment inside the club, where the venue collects its share instead of watching the money leave the building.
Buying clubs is still the other half of the plan, and the same pressure turns up in the numbers of the biggest public name in the business. RCI Hospitality (NASDAQ: $RICK), the company behind Rick's Cabaret, watched its nightclub same-store sales slip 2.1% in its latest fiscal year. Peppermint Hippo, the club group TRWD lined up for its first acquisition, grew revenue more than 20% in 2025 and pushed past $34 million across more than 12 clubs, including the only gentlemen's club on the Las Vegas Strip. Part of that climb came from Las Tóxicas, the group's Latin-themed concept in Las Vegas, Houston, and El Paso, and the first license now carries the platform straight to that same Latin nightlife customer.
Alan Chang, Peppermint Hippo's founder and CEO, joined TRWD's board after growing his brand from one Toledo club in 2018 into a national group, and he brings that playbook to every venue added to the network. Jeremy Woertink, the advisory board member helping build the company's payment gateway, works as a senior programmer at Joystick, an adult livestreaming platform that runs subscriptions, token purchases, and creator payouts. He also rebuilt Namechk as its CTO to handle nearly one million username searches a day, so the gateway is being built by someone who has already kept a platform running under heavy traffic.
With that team behind it, TRWD is building a payments business for an industry that still runs on cash and personal apps, and it has said more licensing agreements are coming after the first. Its Club Management Group is negotiating management contracts with independent operators, and every venue that comes in through a license, a contract, or an acquisition can run on the same platform. Payment companies grew into giants one small cut at a time, and TRWD has started collecting its own with a licensee that put up a non-refundable deposit before a single venue went live. With management pegging that license at up to seven figures and the payments division at eight, against a market cap of under $2.2 million, every venue signed from here adds to a stream that has only just started.
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