He builds the payment rails for the people who actually drive the economy.
A Wall Street engineer who went to Yale Law, sold a fintech for half a billion dollars, then walked away from the consumer app race to chase plumbers, landscapers, and HVAC crews. The result is Coast.
"The customers fintech forgot."
A driver pulls into a gas station in rural Texas, swipes a Coast card, and gets a decline. Not because the account is empty - because the company's telematics say the truck is ninety miles away, parked. Somewhere, a driver is filling a personal pickup on the company dime, and a piece of software just said no. This is the world Daniel Simon decided to fix: not the glamorous one, the one with grease on its hands.
Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast, a New York company rebuilding how America's commercial fleets pay for fuel, maintenance, parking, and everything else that keeps work trucks moving. His typical customer runs twelve to fifteen vehicles and does HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, or home services. It is, by design, the least fashionable customer in fintech - and Simon thinks that is exactly the point.
He has done this before. Before Coast there was Bread, a consumer payments and lending company he co-founded with Josh Abramowitz while still a student, and where he served as both chief technology officer and chief operating officer. Bread sold in 2020 for more than $500 million. Most founders would have taken the win and bought a vineyard. Simon looked at the pandemic, watched truck drivers and field-service workers carry the physical economy on their backs, and noticed how little a decade of fintech had done for them.
Doing it in 2024 is on easy mode compared to 2014.
// On building a fintech company twiceThe line is classic Simon: dry, precise, slightly contrarian. When he launched Bread in 2014, the infrastructure founders now take for granted - Stripe at scale, card issuers like Lithic, off-the-shelf compliance tooling - barely existed. He and his team had to build it. That experience left him with two convictions that shape Coast: ship on modern rails, and treat regulation not as a tax but as a moat.
Figures cited by Daniel Simon and Coast across interviews and funding announcements, 2021-2025.
Most fintech founders chase software first and bolt payments on later. Simon runs the other playbook - payments first, software around it, the way Toast did for restaurants. The fuel card is just the opening move. Once a fleet trusts Coast with the gas pump, the company can expand into parking, tolls, maintenance, supplies, accounts payable, and eventually lending and insurance. The customer already knows they have the problem; nobody needs to be sold on the idea that fuel costs money.
The engineering is the fun part. Coast runs on open Visa rails, so a driver can fuel up anywhere instead of hunting for a specific branded station the way closed-loop incumbents demand. Cards are deliberately fungible - no employee name, no vehicle ID printed on the plastic. Identity lives in a text message instead. A driver texts an ID code, the card wakes up with that vehicle's policies attached, and the whole thing works on a flip phone using T9 predictive texting. It is the rare piece of fintech designed for someone who has never opened an app store.
Coast answers with GPS checks, fuel-gauge data, SMS authentication, and chip security. The truck can no longer lie.
Software engineer and architect, building trading and data systems for Wall Street banks, asset managers, and hedge funds.
Earns a joint J.D./M.B.A. from Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management. Holds a B.A. in International Relations from Boston University.
Co-founds Bread while still a student, with Josh Abramowitz. Serves as CTO and COO.
Bread sells to Alliance Data Systems for more than $500 million.
Founds Coast with former Lyft executive Andrew Woolf. Mission: the financial platform for the future of transportation.
Raises a $6M oversubscribed seed led by Better Tomorrow Ventures. Launches the commercial fuel charge card.
Raises a $40M Series B led by ICONIQ Growth, with a strategic investment from Synchrony.
Raises $92M in new capital, partners with Visa, and opens a second headquarters in Utah.
Launches its first all-in-one card and expense platform built exclusively for fleet businesses.
Early investors told Simon that compliance was the boring part. He disagreed loudly enough to make it a competitive thesis. Coast hired top-tier in-house counsel while still small and brought on a director of compliance with thirty years of experience. The company works with Celtic Bank of Utah, which demands serious anti-money-laundering, fair-lending, and complaint-handling frameworks. Simon's argument is that fintechs which treat regulation as an afterthought have paid an existential price - and that the ones still standing after the storm are the ones who built for it.
That phrase is the whole pitch, and Simon repeats it like a mantra. The plan is not to win the fuel-card category and stop. It is to become the place every dollar a fleet spends passes through - parking and tolls today, accounts payable and bill pay next, then non-card payments like wires and ACH, supply-house rebates, and eventually the full stack of financial services a small business needs. As the trades digitize around platforms like Fleetio, ServiceTitan, and BuildOps, Coast wants to be the payment and visibility layer underneath all of it.
On electric vehicles, Simon is refreshingly unromantic. Adoption in small fleets is slower than the corporate slideware suggests, because total cost of ownership still favors gas and diesel. So Coast serves fleets regardless of what they burn, ready to adapt to EV charging when the economics flip rather than forcing the future to arrive on schedule.
He earned a J.D. from Yale Law and an M.B.A. from Yale's School of Management at the same time - and co-founded Bread before either diploma was framed.
Long before law school, he wrote and architected systems for Wall Street banks and hedge funds. The lawyer who codes is rarer than the founder who lawyers.
Coast's authentication runs over plain SMS on purpose, so a driver with a decade-old handset is never locked out. Accessibility as product strategy.