Matt Marcus

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The Plumber of Payments

The thing about moving money is that moving it is only half the job. The other half - knowing where it went, why it went there, and whether it actually arrived - is what drives finance teams to build sprawling spreadsheets at midnight. Matt Marcus figured this out the hard way at LendingHome in 2017, where he and two colleagues spent a year building a mortgage payment system from scratch. By the time they left, that system had processed over $3 billion in mortgage loans. They also had a very clear picture of what every company with serious payment volume would eventually need to build.

So they built it once, for everyone.

Modern Treasury, which Marcus co-founded in May 2018 alongside Sam Aarons (CTO) and Dimitri Dadiomov, is the payment operations platform sitting behind the scenes of companies like Gusto, Navan, Procore, and Sling Money. It handles not just payment initiation across ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and now stablecoins - but the harder work of reconciliation, ledgering, and giving finance teams real-time visibility into money in motion. Through 2026, the platform has processed over $400 billion for its enterprise customer base.

Marcus grew up in Weston, Florida, and by high school was already operating at a competitive level unusual for someone his age. He won the Florida State Debate Championship in 2012 and qualified twice for the Tournament of Champions in policy debate - a national circuit where preparation depth and on-feet speed are equally non-negotiable. He also scored a perfect 36 on the ACT and earned National Merit Finalist status. The combination of analytical rigor and argumentative precision would follow him north to Dartmouth, where he studied computer science and captained the men's lightweight rowing team.

Rowing lightweight at the Division I level is not a casual commitment. It requires pre-dawn practices, obsessive attention to weight and conditioning, and the particular kind of team discipline where your individual performance is only ever visible as part of a synchronized whole. When Dartmouth awarded him the Louis C. Breer Memorial Bowl in 2016 - an award recognizing "leadership and conscientious effort" and "sportsmanship as a member of the lightweight crew" - it was signaling something about character that a GPA can't quite capture.

After graduating in 2016, Marcus spent a year at LendingHome as a Senior Software Engineer. That's where the thesis crystallized. Building payment operations in-house was expensive, fragile, and distracting from what companies actually wanted to do. The reconciliation problem - matching what the bank saw with what the business application expected - was the kind of thing that only got worse as transaction volume grew. Finance teams ended up piecing together bank statements against application logs manually. It was, as Marcus later described it, an "accounting nightmare."

Modern Treasury went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch and didn't waste much time. The company raised a Series B of $38 million in January 2021, followed by an $85 million Series C later that year at a $2 billion-plus valuation - the same announcement that landed Marcus and Aarons on Forbes 30 Under 30. A $50 million Series C extension followed in March 2022, bringing total funding to $183 million across five rounds.