Emma Zhang

Emma Zhang runs a company most people will never see, inside deals most people will never read about. PactFi, the New York fintech she founded in 2023 and leads as CEO, sits underneath the private credit market - the fast-growing corner of finance where funds lend directly to companies instead of going through banks or public bond markets. Every time one of those loans is structured, syndicated, amended or serviced, a blizzard of coordination has to happen between lenders, borrowers, agents and counsel. For decades that coordination has run on email threads and spreadsheets. Zhang built PactFi to replace it.

Her timing has been unusually good. Private credit in the United States has nearly tripled in a decade, climbing from roughly $550 billion in 2016 to about $1.7 trillion in 2026, with forecasts pointing toward $3.5 trillion by 2028. The money has scaled. The plumbing largely has not. That gap - enormous, unglamorous, and painfully familiar to anyone who has worked a credit desk - is the whole thesis of the company.

PactFi describes itself plainly: a secure, end-to-end operational platform for executing and servicing private credit transactions. In practice it means swapping fragmented inboxes and version-conflicted files for shared processes, structured data exchange and real-time coordination across every party in a deal. The pitch is not glamorous. It is essential, which is arguably better.

A thesis born on the trading floor

Zhang did not arrive at private credit as an outsider looking for a market to disrupt. She lived in it. Before founding PactFi she spent much of her career at Deutsche Bank, working in structured credit and leveraged finance across Hong Kong and New York. That is where the frustration took root: the manual handoffs, the reconciliation by inbox, the risk that hides in the seams between systems that do not talk to each other.

She later served as Head of Product at Bond.One, a step that pulled her from experiencing the problem to building software against it. By the time she started PactFi, she had seen the credit lifecycle from both the deal side and the product side. That combination - a credit structurer who also knows how to ship a platform - is the founder-market fit investors talk about but rarely see this cleanly.

She studied at the University of Sydney before her banking career carried her across two of the world's largest financial hubs. The through-line from Sydney to Hong Kong to New York is less a geography than a vantage point: she watched the same broken workflow repeat in every market she touched.

From launch to $300 billion

The traction has been quick for an infrastructure business, where trust usually has to be earned deal by deal. Since going into production in 2023, PactFi has processed more than $300 billion in deal volume across upward of 250 counterparties. The platform now counts more than 2,600 users representing over 3,000 fund entities. It supports eight of the top 20 credit asset managers, firms holding a combined $3.4 trillion in assets under management, and every one of those top 20 has participated on the platform as a lender.

Those numbers are the kind that make investors lean in. In March 2026 PactFi announced a $25 million Series A led by the 7RIDGE Ecosystem Impact Fund, with participation from Vestigo Ventures. The round is earmarked for product expansion, go-to-market growth, research and development with artificial intelligence woven in, and hiring across product, engineering and client-facing teams.

Why control without friction is the whole game

That last quote captures the tension Zhang keeps returning to. In private credit, the instinct when deals get bigger and more numerous is to add oversight, and oversight usually means more steps, more sign-offs, more places for a deal to stall. The premise of PactFi is that better infrastructure lets a firm do both at once: tighten control while speeding up execution, because the control is built into the process rather than bolted on after the fact.

Carsten Kengeter, CEO of lead investor 7RIDGE, framed the bet in similar terms, describing private credit as weighed down by fragmented, manual processes that create unnecessary friction and risk, and PactFi as reimagining the infrastructure by syndicating loans, automating workflows and delivering institutional-grade data across a network. It is an investor endorsement, but it echoes the founder's own language almost exactly - a sign that the thesis is coherent from both sides of the cap table.

A women-led company in a slow-moving corner of finance

PactFi is a women-led fintech, co-founded by Zhang alongside Alexa Halcomb. That matters in a category - institutional credit infrastructure - not known for either its founder diversity or its appetite for change. The company has leaned into that identity while letting the metrics do the persuading. In a market where the buyers are among the most conservative institutions in finance, adoption by eight of the top 20 asset managers is the argument that counts.

Zhang's design philosophy is deliberately restrained. She has said one of the core principles of the platform is to balance customization with simplicity, security and ease. It is a founder resisting the temptation to build everything for everyone, choosing instead to make the essential path clean. For infrastructure that has to sit inside the workflows of the largest credit managers in the world, that restraint is a feature, not a limitation.

What comes next follows the money. The Series A points toward deeper AI integration in deal workflows, a wider product surface, and a bigger team - the standard playbook for a company trying to graduate from useful tool to indispensable network. If Zhang succeeds, the market she is building for will keep growing toward $3.5 trillion, and an increasing share of it will quietly run on the software she started building in 2023.