The engineer who makes money move
Somewhere in San Francisco, in the wiring behind the payment buttons of companies you use every day, Ankit Kumar's code is running. Not in a metaphorical sense. The payments infrastructure he helped build at Modern Treasury has processed over $400 billion in transactions - ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and now stablecoins, all routed through a single programmable layer.
Modern Treasury's new integrated PSP launched in February 2026 and Ankit was among the engineers who turned the idea into production infrastructure. The pitch is deceptively simple: most companies building payment products don't actually need a direct bank relationship. What they need is exactly what Modern Treasury built - custodial accounts, rail access, and real-time visibility, all through an API. The hard part was making it work at scale. That's the part Ankit does.
He's described by colleagues as "a great technical leader and mentor to our team with a complete set of engineering skills and tremendous experience." In engineering cultures, that kind of language means something specific: the person who can see around corners, who others go to when things are stuck, who makes the team faster without making the system fragile.
From Pune to the payment rails
In 2013, Ankit was a Computer Engineering student at MIT College of Engineering in Pune, captaining a team of 51 students in the ABU Robocon international robotics competition. They built autonomous robots - programmed with 3-axis gyroscopes and AtMega microcontrollers - and finished 6th out of 84 teams nationally. He also raised $16,500 in budget while doing it. The robots competed. The logistics were already a second project.
The same year, he interned at Rubus Labs in Gurgaon, which was building apps for BlackBerry. His app earned a 5-star rating and the BuiltForBlackBerry distinction - the platform's official quality certification. This was pre-iPhone dominance in India. Building for BlackBerry in 2013 meant you were building for what businesses actually used.
He graduated with a B.E. in Computer Engineering from Pune University in 2014, and immediately flew to Syracuse, New York to pursue his Master's. The academic work was rigorous - operating systems, security, mobile platforms, algorithms - but the real education was happening in parallel. He was building apps.
QuickShot HD was an Android app that solved a friction point so specific most people hadn't named it: launching the camera app was too slow. Ankit found a way around an Android OS limitation, reducing camera launch time by a factor of two. The app got picked up by AndroidPIT, Droid-life, Phonearena, and others - earning the title "The Ultimate Camera App" from tech journalists who didn't hand out that kind of praise lightly. He was still a student at the time.
The app wasn't alone. 'Sneaky Cam' - which allowed users to take discreet photos by layering camera previews with screenshots - earned coverage from Phonearena and makeuseof.com. These weren't viral moments in the modern sense; they were the result of an engineer who identified a problem, built a clean solution, and shipped it. The pattern would repeat.
In 2015, Ankit landed an internship at BMW of North America in Mountain View, California. The project: next-generation augmented reality helmet prototypes for the BMW Motorrad Vision Head-Up Display. Using C# and Unity3D, he built AR systems that integrated with Arduino hardware via serial communication. The prototypes went to CES 2016. The jump from Android camera apps to AR motorcycle helmets in 18 months tells you something about the range.
"Many companies don't need a direct bank relationship. They need payment infrastructure - custodial accounts, access to rails like ACH and RTP, and the ability to pull money in, push money out, and distribute funds across multiple parties with full visibility and control."
Modern Treasury - on the PSP thesis that Ankit helped buildLanding at Modern Treasury
After graduating from Syracuse in May 2016 with a 3.64 GPA in Computer Science, Ankit made his way to San Francisco - the place where the things he'd been building toward started to converge. Payment infrastructure, programmable APIs, financial technology. Modern Treasury was building the operating system for money movement, and he joined the engineering team.
Modern Treasury was founded in 2018 by Dimitri Dadiomov, Matt Marcus, and Sam Aarons - three engineers who had previously built payment operations at Kiavi (formerly LendingHome). The company sits at a particular intersection: it's technical enough that engineering teams trust it, and reliable enough that finance teams depend on it. It raised a $50M Series C in March 2022, with total funding crossing $183M, and earned a $2B+ valuation.
Ankit became one of the engineers responsible for building the full-stack Payments product - Modern Treasury's integrated PSP that lets companies embed fiat and stablecoin payments without needing direct bank relationships. ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and stablecoins through a single API. The product launched publicly in February 2026. The infrastructure underneath it had been years in the making.
He programmed autonomous robots competing internationally before he had his undergraduate degree, built apps that got called "The Ultimate Camera App" while completing a Master's, and then quietly went to work making payment infrastructure invisible and reliable for the companies that need it most.
What Modern Treasury actually does
Modern Treasury builds payment operations software. The customers are companies that move significant volumes of money - healthcare companies processing insurance payouts, real estate platforms disbursing proceeds, marketplaces paying sellers. The product sits between their software and the banks, handling the complexity of ACH batches, wire formatting, real-time payment confirmations, and reconciliation.
The February 2026 Payments PSP launch expanded the offering: instead of just connecting companies to their existing banks, Modern Treasury now operates as a full payment service provider. Sub-accounts, custodial FBO structures, stablecoin rails through the Beam acquisition - the company moved from infrastructure layer to payment product. Ankit Kumar was on the engineering team that built it.
The company raised $183M in total funding, including a $50M Series C in March 2022. It's backed by Altimeter Capital and Benchmark. It's used by companies in healthcare, real estate, e-commerce, and financial services. The infrastructure Ankit works on is not academic. It clears real money, every day, at scale.