
He sold duplicate Panini stickers at seven, met his co-founders at university, and learned to turn ugly integration work into infrastructure. Now Kombo's CEO is taking that very specific obsession from Berlin to New York.

He got tired of hunting down his own income across YouTube, Substack and crypto wallets at tax time. So he built the plumbing that lets any app pull a creator's data from one place.
Orthogonal is a San Francisco startup building the discovery, orchestration, and payment layer for AI agents. Through a single SDK, REST API, MCP server, or CLI, agents can find, call, and pay per-use for 35+ third-party APIs - from data enrichment to search and scraping - with no subscriptions, no key management, and no sales calls. Founded in 2025 by Christian Pickett and Bera Sogut, the company raised a $4.3M seed round led by Pantera Capital and is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch.
Fuze is a Dubai-based digital asset infrastructure company that lets banks, fintechs, and enterprises across MENA and Turkey offer regulated crypto and stablecoin services through a single API. Its stack spans Digital Assets-as-a-Service, an OTC trading desk, stablecoin payment rails, embedded trading, and custody, all built on regulated, compliant infrastructure. Licensed by Dubai's VARA and holding a Retail Payment Services license from the UAE Central Bank, Fuze has onboarded hundreds of institutions and processed billions in digital asset volume since its 2023 launch.
Kombo is a unified API that lets B2B software companies connect to hundreds of HR, payroll, recruiting (ATS), and learning systems through a single integration. Instead of building and maintaining separate connectors to systems like Personio, BambooHR, Workday, Greenhouse, and Paychex, customers integrate Kombo once and gain access to a normalized data model and authentication layer across 300+ HR and ATS tools. Founded in 2022 and based in Berlin and New York, Kombo positions itself as the infrastructure layer for people data - from hire to retire.
Phyllo is a universal API that gives developers and businesses secure, creator-consented access to data across hundreds of social and creator platforms - YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, LinkedIn, Substack, Shopify and more. Often described as 'Plaid for the creator economy,' Phyllo maintains live data feeds and returns a normalized dataset covering identity, engagement, content and income, so companies building influencer marketing tools, creator-focused fintech, and brand-safety screening can integrate once instead of wrangling dozens of individual platform APIs.
Speakeasy is a San Francisco developer-infrastructure company that turns an OpenAPI specification into production-grade, type-safe SDKs across ten-plus languages, then keeps them in sync automatically as the API changes. Founded in 2022 by Sagar Batchu and Simon Yu, it has expanded from SDK and Terraform-provider generation into an AI control plane for the Model Context Protocol - products like Gram and the MCP Gateway let companies expose their APIs as governed tools for AI agents. Speakeasy has raised roughly $26 million, including a $15M Series A led by FPV Ventures in 2024, and counts Vercel, Mistral AI, Clerk, Kong, Fivetran, Airbyte, and SolarWinds among its customers.
Spinwheel is an Oakland-based fintech that provides real-time consumer credit data and embedded-payments infrastructure through developer APIs. Using a credentialless approach that needs only a phone number and date of birth, Spinwheel lets lenders, personal-finance apps, and debt-management companies connect, verify, and act on a consumer's debts and liabilities. The platform supports the full consumer-credit lifecycle - from segmentation and prequalification to disbursement, management, and payment - and, as of its 2025 Series A, powers more than 15 million users and 165 million connected accounts representing over $1.5 trillion in connected debt.
Nick Anastasiades is the co-founder and CEO of Benji, a New York-based startup building a universal API for loyalty partnerships - what the industry calls the 'Plaid for loyalty.' Benji lets airlines, hotels, retailers and consumer brands link their rewards systems so members can earn and redeem points across companies, collapsing integrations that once took a year into a matter of days. In May 2026 the company raised a $6.25M seed round and counts JetBlue, CookUnity, 1-800-Flowers and Chip City among a network representing more than 50 million members. Benji is the third company Nick has built with co-founders Jon Elron and Arik Gaisler, following 2ndKitchen, the B2B virtual-kitchen platform acquired by REEF Technology in 2021. Raised in Beirut and trained at UC Berkeley and Northwestern, he is a Forbes Next 1000 entrepreneur and a Chicago Innovation Award winner.
Shmulik Fishman is the founder and CEO of Argyle, a New York fintech that turns messy workforce and payroll data into a single consumer-permissioned API used by 300+ clients including Mastercard, SoFi, and LendingClub. A Hampshire College philosophy major turned operator, he co-founded the fleet-software company Stratim (acquired by KAR Global) before starting Argyle in 2018. He has raised roughly $100M+ and leads with a transparency-first, inbox-zero, early-morning style.