Most fintech founders chase consumers. Dean Leavitt looked at the same industry and saw the bigger, messier, more valuable half nobody wanted to touch.
Walk into the world of digital payments and you will meet a hundred apps built to move twenty dollars between two phones. Dean M. Leavitt built the opposite. From a New York office at 767 Third Avenue, he runs Boost Payment Solutions, the company that quietly handles how the planet's largest enterprises pay one another - invoices in the millions, across borders, between trading partners who have never met. It is unglamorous plumbing. It is also, by his own estimate, a $125 trillion market. "The size of the global B2B market is estimated at $125 trillion," he likes to point out, "dwarfing the B2C market." For most of his career, almost no one was building for it.
That is the strange specific worth holding onto: the consumer payments revolution came with confetti, brand campaigns and tap-to-pay billboards. The B2B equivalent came with Dean Leavitt and a patent portfolio. Today Boost runs in more than 45 countries, and over half of the Fortune 100 either send or receive money across its network. The top commercial card issuers in the United States lean on its rails. It has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies five separate times.
A vacuum hiding in plain sight
Leavitt founded Boost in 2009, but the idea was earned over two decades. He had already spent roughly twenty years inside the payments industry by then, watching incumbents try to bolt consumer-grade solutions onto enterprise-sized problems. They never fit. Commercial trading partners had different rules, different reconciliation headaches, different reasons to say no to a card. "I identified a clear gap in the ecosystem," he has said of the moment he decided to go out on his own. The decision was less a leap than a diagnosis.
What Boost built in response is what Leavitt calls Payments-as-a-Service. "We define PaaS as the provision of our technology to serve as the B2B front end gateway," he explains. The mechanics matter less to the buyer than the result: straight-through processing, automated reconciliation, virtual card acceptance, and a set of dynamic, rules-based engines that let a supplier and a buyer agree on terms a legacy processor could never accommodate. The patents are the moat. The simplicity is the product.
What keeps me going after all these years are the endless opportunities to help businesses by solving new, complex problems.
The man who got handed the hard ones
Leavitt did not arrive at Boost as a first-timer with a deck. He arrived with scar tissue. Back in 1989 he started a company focused on consumer card acceptance, then founded and ran US Data Capture, a New York credit card processor serving the institutional marketplace. There he negotiated card acceptance agreements with hospitals, universities, municipalities and supermarkets - the kind of buttoned-up institutions that, at the time, simply did not take cards. He helped change that.
He went on to serve as Chairman and CEO of US Wireless Data, a publicly traded company, learning the particular discipline of running payments under the glare of public markets. And in the stretch immediately before founding Boost, he took on a role most executives would decline: bankruptcy court-appointed Interim President of Cynergy Data, where he steered the credit card processor through restructuring and a sale. It is a resume with a pattern. When a payments company was tangled, public, or in court, Dean Leavitt was the one who got the call.
That history explains the temperament of the company he built next. Boost is not a story about a clever feature. It is a story about an operator who understood exactly how enterprise money actually moves - and refused to pretend the hard parts did not exist.
On the work, and where it's going
Leavitt credits a generational shift for the momentum behind Boost. Younger finance professionals, he argues, walked into their jobs expecting payments to be digitized and integrated into their workflows the way everything else in their lives already is. The patience for paper checks and manual remittance ran out. Boost's bet is that the consultative partner - not just the cheapest processor - wins the enterprise relationship. So far, the Fortune 100 roster on its network suggests the bet is paying off.
Career, by the year
- 1989Starts his first company, focused on the consumer card acceptance industry.
- 1990sFounds and leads US Data Capture, pioneering card acceptance with hospitals, universities, municipalities and supermarkets.
- 2000sServes as Chairman and CEO of publicly traded US Wireless Data.
- 2009Appointed by the bankruptcy court as Interim President of Cynergy Data, leading its restructuring and sale.
- 2009Founds Boost Payment Solutions to serve the overlooked B2B payments market.
- 2021Boost raises a $22M Series C led by Invictus Growth Partners to expand globally.
- 2025Boost named a 2025 Inc. 5000 honoree at No. 3561, with 109% three-year growth.
How Boost actually moves money
Strip away the acronyms and Boost does something deceptively simple to describe and brutally hard to build: it lets two businesses transact on a commercial card without either side absorbing the friction that usually kills the deal. Suppliers traditionally resist card payments because of cost. Buyers want the working-capital benefit of paying by card. Boost's rules-based engine sits in the middle and reconciles those competing interests automatically - dynamic terms, tokenized card data, straight-through processing, and remittance detail that lands clean instead of in a spreadsheet someone has to untangle by hand.
That automated reconciliation is the part Leavitt's enterprise customers actually feel. A finance team that once chased line-item detail across systems gets it delivered. A supplier that once refused cards gets terms that make sense. The technology is patented, the integrations run through the major card networks, and the whole thing is designed to disappear into the workflows finance professionals already use. Good infrastructure is invisible. Leavitt has spent more than a decade making sure his is.
Proof in the numbers
In May 2021, Boost closed a $22 million Series C round led by Invictus Growth Partners. The proceeds went toward exactly the kind of expansion Leavitt had been describing for years: deeper reach across healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, freight and logistics, and real estate, and a broader global footprint. The Inc. 5000 nods - five of them - are the quieter validation. Fast growth in B2B payments is not a viral chart. It is the slow accumulation of enterprises that tried the network and stayed.
The 2025 list put Boost at No. 3561 with 109% growth over three years - the kind of number that does not trend on social media but signals durable compounding to the institutional investors who back companies like his. For a category most people will never think about, that is the entire point.