A small French company with a big bitcoin habit just made its boldest bet in a year — one that leaves it sitting on a steep paper loss.

Capital B SA, the Euronext Growth Paris-listed firm that calls itself Europe's first "Bitcoin Treasury Company," confirmed Monday it acquired 376 BTC for €25.3 million ($29.4 million), its largest single purchase since September 2025. The buy pushes the company's total holdings to 3,521 bitcoin, acquired over nearly two years for a cumulative €309.4 million ($359.3 million) — an average cost of roughly €87,878, or about $102,000, per coin.

There's just one problem: bitcoin isn't trading anywhere near that price. With BTC changing hands around $79,500 on Monday, The Block reported, Capital B's own filing puts the current market value of its stash at €240.8 million — roughly €68.6 million, or about $80 million, below what it paid. In other words, the company just added to a position that's already deep in the red.

Financed by warrants, warrants and more warrants

The purchase was funded by two capital raises completed this month: a €1.44 million share issuance under an at-the-market program with quant fund TOBAM, and a €28.7 million private placement of shares bundled with stock warrants, sold to institutional investors including Blockstream CEO and cypherpunk pioneer Adam Back. Back personally kicked in an extra €7.6 million ($8.8 million) on September 2, lifting his ordinary stake in Capital B to 17.64%. Blockstream Capital Partners remains the largest shareholder overall, holding nearly 19% of ordinary shares and, once its bitcoin-denominated convertible bonds are counted, almost 32% on a fully diluted basis.

Maxim Group LLC placed the private offering. Swissquote Bank Europe, a Luxembourg-regulated crypto custodian, executed the bitcoin purchase and holds the coins via Swiss firm Taurus's custody technology.

Capital B tracks its own progress using a metric it calls "BTC Yield" — the growth in bitcoin held per fully diluted share — which the company says stands at 2.17% year to date. Notably, the filing itself cautions that the figure is not a return-on-investment measure and says nothing about whether shareholders are actually making money.

The math gets messier still: Capital B's outstanding warrants and convertible bonds could bring in roughly 415 million additional shares if fully exercised, on top of the 382.5 million ordinary shares already outstanding. To manage the sprawl, the company is executing a 10-for-1 reverse stock split effective Tuesday, September 8, collapsing its share count back down.

Capital B's strategy mirrors the "bitcoin treasury company" playbook popularized by Michael Saylor's Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and Japan's Metaplanet: raise equity and debt cheaply, funnel the proceeds into bitcoin, and bet that the coin's price outruns the dilution over time. The company's own strategy page says its goal is increasing bitcoin held per share over time, not defending a short-term cost basis.

Whether that bet pays off depends almost entirely on where bitcoin trades from here. Since Capital B's average purchase price sits well above Monday's spot price, the firm — and the institutional backers who just wrote fresh checks — are for now betting on a rebound that hasn't yet arrived.