Jeremy Almond has a rather personal objection to the way money moves. His family spent twenty years working toward a home. The financial crisis of 2008 helped undo that achievement. Years later, he would co-found a company devoted to changing financial infrastructure, which is an unusually elaborate response to being disappointed by one's bank. It is also a response with a clear internal logic: an engineer encounters a system that fails people, then starts examining its machinery.
Today, Almond is co-founder and CEO of Paystand, the business payments company he helped establish in 2013. His subject is the unglamorous passage between sending an invoice and actually receiving the money. There are few red carpets in accounts receivable. There are, however, fees, delays, paper, and people whose afternoons disappear into reconciliation. Almond has built his working life around the proposition that these arrangements can be improved.
A house before a company
Almond grew up in Stockton, California, and was among the first in his family to attend college and graduate school. His mother came from Mexico; his father worked in construction. The family history gives his interest in finance a human scale. Before there was a payment network to build, there was the much simpler ambition of earning enough to own a place to live.
He has described his frustration with banks in blunt language. The financial system, he said, “had let us down.” The grievance matters because it supplies something a product roadmap cannot: a reason to keep caring when the work becomes repetitive. A founder can enjoy a clever technical problem for a weekend. Asking businesses to change how they get paid requires a longer acquaintance with persistence.
His eventual answer was commercial rather than domestic. Paystand would tackle business payments, where the transfer of money meets the software companies already use to run themselves. The route from a family home to an enterprise invoice is indirect, but recognizably his: start with a consequence that feels wrong, then work backward toward the systems producing it.
The engineer meets the ledger
Almond studied computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and earned a master's in business at the University of Massachusetts. He began his technology career at Digital Instruments, a nanotechnology company acquired by Veeco. There he worked on architecture and a global enterprise resource planning implementation. An ERP system holds the records a business needs to operate, including the financial ones.
That assignment gave him an early view of enterprise payment problems. A company could invest in sophisticated software and still struggle with the practical business of collecting its money. For an engineer, this is an irritating mismatch. The records have become digital; the process connecting them can remain stubbornly manual. The computer knows a sale occurred. Someone still has to make the payment and the accounting agree.
His later roles have included startup advising and investing, alongside operating companies. He brings that double perspective to Paystand: the person making a product must also make a business durable enough to keep improving it. Software can be rewritten. A company's patience, cash, and customer trust require more careful budgeting.
A subscription with an argument attached
Paystand's central commercial idea is straightforward: sell payment software through a subscription, and let businesses receive payments on its network without a charge on every transaction. Its current accounts receivable offer uses a flat annual platform fee. The distinction matters. A subscription still costs money, while the economics of accepting another in-network payment differ from those of paying a percentage each time.
Consider an illustrative business collecting a million dollars. A hypothetical three-percent processing charge would consume $30,000 before any other costs. Double the collections and that percentage charge doubles as well. A fixed platform charge creates a different relationship between growth and processing expense. The actual comparison depends on the contract and payment method, but the arithmetic explains why Almond thinks the business model deserves as much attention as the technology.
In a 2019 interview, he explained the appeal as “predictable costs.” He also described a wider ambition: automating the cash cycle from invoicing to reconciliation. Receiving money is only part of the job. Knowing which invoice it belongs to, updating the books, and sparing someone a detective assignment are part of the product, too. The payment should arrive with its paperwork behaving itself.
Building south, and on both sides of the bill
In July 2021, Paystand announced a $50 million Series C. Almond's explanation of the funding emphasized investors prepared to support a lengthy build, including NewView Capital, SoftBank's Opportunity Fund, and King River Capital. He wanted room to extend a payment network and build more of the software used by finance teams. Raising capital was a means of financing that work; the work still had to justify itself to customers.
The acquisition of Mexico's Yaydoo followed in 2022. It brought accounts payable, cash-flow management, and regional knowledge into the picture. Almond already knew Yaydoo's Sergio Almaguer, and the connection had a personal dimension: his mother's family was from Mexico. Before the deal, nearly half of Paystand's employees were already based in Latin America, including teams in Guadalajara and Hermosillo.
That detail makes the expansion more interesting than a line added to a map. People inside the business already worked across the cultures and markets it wanted to connect. Almond described the opportunity as extending work into the company's own backyard. The acquisition joined the problem of collecting a bill to the corresponding problem of paying one.
- 2022Yaydoo
Payables and Latin America - 2024Teampay
Purchasing and spend management - 2025Bitwage
Global payroll and payouts
Teampay, acquired in April 2024, extended the approach into spend management. Paystand said the combined network touched more than one million businesses. That number describes network reach, rather than a count of companies all buying identical subscriptions. The direction was nevertheless clear: Almond wanted a connected system for the money coming in and the money going out, with fewer separate tools for finance teams to supervise.
Bitwage added another piece in November 2025: international payouts and payroll. This time, Paystand had already been a customer. Almond wrote that its team had used Bitwage for international vendors and contractors, and that he had received portions of his own payroll and bonuses in Bitcoin. His product conviction came with a payslip attached. It is a more intimate form of due diligence than admiring a demonstration.
An introvert with a microphone
The public-facing Almond hosts the reDeFined podcast, discussing money and technology with people building in the Bitcoin ecosystem. By 2026, conversations included Rootstock co-founders Gabriel Kurman and Adrian Eidelman, and the brothers Alvaro Sol and Juan Diego Sol of Ibex. The format gives him room to examine the infrastructure behind an idea, alongside the personal reasons its builders chose it.
He has also described himself as an introvert. In a conversation with Lindsay Hadley, he explained that telling his story publicly did not come naturally. He had been encouraged by the possibility that seeing someone else's path could help people recognize opportunities for themselves. Visibility, in that account, has a practical purpose beyond promoting a company.
He pointed to his involvement with Digital NEST, which connects young people from underrepresented communities with technology education and opportunities. He also discussed spending time with entrepreneurs and young people in Latin America. These interests fit his own experience of gaining access to education. The question of who gets a chance appears in his life well before it becomes a question about who gets access to better payments.
“I'm an introvert.”
Jeremy Almond, in conversation with Lindsay Hadley
First, the surf. Then, the systems.
There is a less corporate introduction available. Almond is a surfer based in Santa Cruz. In 2020, he said he tried to surf every morning. It is a pleasingly physical counterpoint to a career spent considering how invisible value travels through invisible networks. A wave has the courtesy to make its arrival quite obvious.
That same interview returned to the matter of purpose. His advice to prospective founders was to combine distinctive professional knowledge with a personal reason to build. Money, power, and fame were inadequate foundations for the difficult stretches. Coming from someone who had spent years working on commercial payment plumbing, the point feels earned. Much of the job offers fewer immediate rewards than a good morning in the water.
The invoice acquires a future
In April 2026, Paystand introduced USDb, a dollar-pegged stablecoin designed for business workflows. The company presents it as a settlement layer carrying invoice and accounting context alongside money. The ambition echoes Almond's earlier ERP experience: make the transfer and its business meaning travel together. A payment without context can leave a finance team holding money and a fresh mystery.
By September, his writing had turned to “digital employees”: software agents taking on ongoing responsibilities in finance. He described asking Paystand managers to introduce them into their teams, with documentation, explicit ownership, and human oversight. Reporting, spending controls, and collections were among the functions he discussed. These were his plans and product direction, with the operational results still needing to be earned.
The thread through those changes is unusually consistent. Almond keeps returning to the distance between what software can do and what financial work still asks of people. He began with an engineer's view of enterprise systems and a family's experience of their consequences. He now proposes machinery that can do more of the routine work itself. The useful test remains wonderfully ordinary: did the business get paid, did the books make sense, and did anyone get their afternoon back?