He helped build a health-insurance unicorn. Now he's chasing the customer every other fintech walked past: the 73 million Americans on Social Security.
Add a new payee at Charlie and something unusual happens - nothing. Not yet. The transfer pauses for up to six hours. A text lands. An email follows. A short lesson on fraud appears on the screen. The feature is called SpeedBump, and it exists because the people Charlie serves lose an estimated $36 billion a year to scams. Most banks race to move money. Charlie, deliberately, stalls.
That instinct - to design around the person, not the transaction - is the through-line of Kevin Nazemi's career. He is the co-founder and CEO of Charlie, a Los Angeles fintech built for one slice of America that Silicon Valley spent a decade ignoring: people aged 62 and older.
The pitch sounds almost contrarian. Venture capital chased Gen Z debit cards and crypto wallets while roughly 73 million seniors collected Social Security on banking products designed for nobody in particular. Nazemi looked at the same map and saw the open lane everyone else had driven past.
Charlie launched nationwide in May 2023. Faster access to Social Security checks. Competitive yield on balances. No monthly fees. No minimums. Free access to more than 55,000 ATMs. US-based humans on the phone. And a fraud-defense posture built for a generation that grew up trusting institutions and is now hunted by them.
The market noticed quickly. Within six months Charlie had pulled together roughly $23 million - a $16 million Series A led by TTV Capital, with FPV Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures, plus $7 million in debt. For a company barely half a year into operating in all 50 states, the appetite was a vote on the thesis.
What makes Nazemi worth watching is not that he found the gap. It is that he has found versions of it three times - in health insurance, in retiree health, and now in banking - and keeps planting his flag where the incumbents see only a low-margin afterthought.
"We took out a blank sheet of paper and reimagined building a banking experience from the ground up for the unique needs of older Americans."
- Kevin Nazemi, Co-Founder & CEO, Charlie
The story starts at MIT, where Nazemi - full name Sina Kevin Nazemi - studied political science and graduated in 2003. From there it was Microsoft, where he climbed from product manager to global business manager to marketing director, working on a product that eventually counted its revenue in the hundreds of millions.
Then, in 2012, the swerve. With Harvard Business School classmates Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser, Nazemi co-founded Oscar Health, a startup that tried to make health insurance feel less like a hostage situation. He served as co-CEO until 2015. Oscar became one of the most talked-about insurance bets of the decade, and Inc. named Nazemi to its 35 Under 35 list in 2014.
He did not stop at insurance. In 2016 he co-founded Renew Health, a technology-driven platform aimed squarely at retirees, and ran it as CEO through 2020. The pattern was hardening: pick an industry that treats older people as an afterthought, and rebuild it around them.
Charlie, founded in 2021, was the logical next move - the place where healthcare, money, and aging finally collide. The spark was personal. Nazemi had spent time helping his own father navigate the labyrinth of American healthcare and finances, and came away convinced the banking piece was broken in ways nobody was fixing.
His resume reads like a man who keeps getting handed the keys early. Co-CEO of a health-insurance disruptor. CEO of a retiree platform. Chairman and CEO of Digital Transformation Opportunities Corp. A board seat at Premera Blue Cross, the largest health plan in the Pacific Northwest. The titles change. The target customer rarely does.
Most fintech features compete on speed. Charlie's most distinctive one competes on friction. SpeedBump triggers when a new payee appears, when a device sits unused for 30 days then suddenly transacts, or when a transfer clears $100. It pauses the money for up to six hours, alerts the customer across app, text, and email, and uses the wait to teach.
It is a strange thing to brag about - a bank that is intentionally slower. But for a customer base that loses billions to scammers each year, that six-hour window is the difference between a near miss and a drained account. In an era where AI makes fraud cheaper and more convincing, designing for the pause is its own kind of innovation.
The business model is just as deliberate. Charlie makes its money on debit-card interchange, not on the customer's wallet. That is how it keeps the promise of no monthly fees and no minimums - the revenue comes from Visa transactions, not from nickel-and-diming retirees.
Triggers: new payee, a 30-day-dormant device, or transfers over $100.
Action: pauses the transaction up to 6 hours.
Alerts: app + text + email, plus a short fraud lesson.
Result: time to reverse a scam before the money is gone.
"Over 50% of the 73 million seniors in the United States do not feel prepared financially for retirement, and for too long, their unique financial needs have been neglected."
"Whenever you launch a new company, it's nerve-wracking. There was a collective sigh of relief when we saw so many customers signing up and we knew our approach was resonating."
"This is our primary source of revenue and enables us to provide customers with no monthly fees and free access to over 55,000 ATMs."