
From putting a product within reach on a screen to moving a stubborn paper check into a digital payment, Sheila Dahlgren's career has followed one durable idea: technology wins when people can see the practical difference.

A broke college student wondered why debit cards earned no points. The detour that followed led him beneath checkout, into the slow machinery of ACH, and toward a harder question: can a bank payment be trusted before it moves?

Across Amazon, American Express, Klarna, ComplyAdvantage and Versapay, Elizabeth Bramlage has built a career translating financial machinery into stories people can use - and teams can act on.

A hummus lunch produced a hunch. More than 300 finance professionals, roughly 450 conversations and one very long beard turned it into Routable.

The Plooto CEO has spent a career moving between art, private equity, enterprise software and payments. His current bet is that the quiet mechanics of cash flow deserve the same attention as growth.

The former bond investor now runs InterPayments, where the visible fee is merely the tip of an iceberg made of card rules, state laws and customer psychology.

A lawyer from Montería spent years learning how rules and businesses fit together. Now he is building the connective tissue that lets money move between banks, businesses, and borders in real time.

After an exit, a tour through global remittances, and hundreds of conversations with traders and finance teams, Maxwell Obi chose a gloriously unglamorous problem: helping emerging-market businesses move money on time.

A failed machinery marketplace taught the Chilean founder where to look: not for glamorous problems, but for the stubborn little tasks that quietly swallow a finance team’s week.

The NextPay co-founder wrote the ledger, hid a few Easter eggs, and helped turn a pandemic pivot into Philippine payment infrastructure. Now he is testing whether an engineering team can share more than a codebase.

He moved from embedded car computers to global telecom, then into payments, trade credit, and steel - a career built around making complicated markets feel less complicated to the people inside them.

The ConnexPay CEO has spent two decades inside the machinery of business payments. His operating thesis is refreshingly plain: speed matters, but context closes the loop.

After three decades in payments, the Mesh co-founder is chasing an oddly radical outcome: business spending that explains itself before finance has to ask.

The former Tennessee long snapper now runs PAYRA, a Nashville fintech built for businesses that cannot pause to replace the systems keeping their money moving.

Prajit Nanu is the co-founder and CEO of Nium, the Singapore-born fintech unicorn that has quietly become the plumbing behind global money movement for banks, airlines, and digital platforms. Starting with a frustrating attempt to wire INR 40,000 for a friend's bachelor party in Phuket, he built what is now a $1.4 billion payments infrastructure company processing over $8 billion annually across 190+ countries in 100 currencies. A commerce graduate from Mumbai with a sales background rather than a fintech pedigree, Nanu turned that outsider status into competitive advantage - building what incumbents told him was impossible.
Kirill Gertman is the co-founder and CEO of Conduit, a New York-based B2B cross-border payments platform that settles international transactions using stablecoins. After more than a dozen years building fintech products in banking and startups - including product leadership roles at BRD (acquired by Coinbase) and Eco - he launched Conduit in 2021. The company pivoted from crypto-backed DeFi analytics to cross-border payments after the 2022 market downturn, and now processes more than $10 billion in annualized volume across a network of 20-plus banks in nine countries. In May 2025, Conduit raised a $36 million Series A co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Altos Ventures.
Malte Rau is the Berlin-based CEO and co-founder of Pliant, a B2B fintech that lets companies and banks issue physical and virtual credit cards and plug the resulting data straight into their finance stacks. A former risk manager and fintech investor, he founded Pliant in February 2020 with Fabian Terner and has grown it into a modular, API-first card-issuing platform serving thousands of European businesses. In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest to fund its expansion into the United States.
Shai Gabay is co-founder and CEO of Trustmi, an end-to-end B2B payment security platform he started in 2021 with Eli Ben-Nun. Trustmi uses behavioral AI to catch business payment fraud, vendor impersonation and process errors in real time. Gabay was an amateur hacker at 13, served in Israel's Unit 8200, and before Trustmi ran security and product for banks and cyber companies including Discount Bank, Cyberbit, Cynet and Opera.
Catherine Jiang is the founder and CEO of Dill, a Y Combinator-backed (W23) software company that helps construction suppliers automate accounts receivable, online payments, credit applications, and lien rights management to get paid faster. A second-time founder, she previously co-founded SiteTrace (acquired by BuildCentrix) and was a product manager at Yelp. She holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford. Dill launched in 2023 serving foodservice distributors and later refocused on the construction supply chain, where late payments and paper-based invoicing choke cash flow.
Dean M. Leavitt is the founder and CEO of Boost Payment Solutions, a New York fintech he launched in 2009 to build commercial card and B2B payment rails for large enterprises. A 30-plus-year payments veteran who previously ran public and bankruptcy-rescued processing companies, he spotted a vacuum in the roughly $125 trillion global B2B market and built patented straight-through processing technology now used across 45-plus countries by more than half the Fortune 100. Boost has landed on the Inc. 5000 five times and raised a $22 million Series C led by Invictus Growth Partners in 2021.
Yaser Masoudnia is the co-founder and CEO of BlueTape, a fintech company that gives the construction industry's suppliers, contractors and distributors the payment tools and working capital they have long been denied. A serial entrepreneur and a licensed general contractor with over a decade swinging a hammer, he previously built and exited the cybersecurity startup NoPassword (acquired by LogMeIn), then ran the LastPass product team. He started coding games on a Commodore 64 at 13 in Iran and now splits his identity between two worlds most people keep apart: software and construction sites.
Victor Lopez is the co-founder and CEO of FlexPoint, a payments-automation platform built for managed service providers and the small businesses they serve. A former finance lawyer turned private-credit principal at Owl Rock/Blue Owl Capital, he left the world of middle-market lending to attack a less glamorous problem: getting small businesses paid faster. Founded in 2022 and launched in 2023, FlexPoint raised a $12M Series A led by Foundry Group in 2025 and now handles payments for tens of thousands of businesses.
Daniel Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast, a New York fintech rebuilding the way commercial fleets pay for fuel, maintenance, and everything else that keeps work trucks moving. A software engineer turned Yale-trained lawyer, he co-founded the consumer lender Bread (sold for over $500M in 2020) before turning his attention to plumbers, HVAC installers, and landscapers - the 'real-world' businesses he felt a decade of fintech had ignored. Coast has raised more than $200M from ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Insight Partners, and Synchrony, and runs on Visa rails with an SMS-based driver authentication system that works on flip phones.
Grant Halloran is the Chief Executive Officer of Billtrust, the B2B accounts receivable workflow and payments company. He stepped into the role in December 2025 after a multi-year run as CEO of Planful, where he tripled revenue and doubled both the customer base and headcount. A 25-year enterprise software operator, he has held senior roles at Anaplan, Infor, Heavy.ai (formerly OmniSci / MapD), and co-founded the SaaS marketing platform Orbis with his brother in Australia in the late 1990s.
Ofer Feldman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stampli, a Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation company he co-founded with his brother Eyal Feldman in 2015. A computer engineer by training from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Ofer spent over a decade building software across defense, enterprise, and healthcare sectors before channeling that depth into Stampli. Under his technical leadership, Stampli has grown to process over $100 billion in invoices annually for 1,600+ businesses, raised $145.7 million in total funding including a $61M Series D led by Blackstone in 2023, and pioneered Cognitive AI that brings human-level PO matching to finance teams worldwide.
Jonathan Ebinger is a General Partner at BlueRun Ventures and Co-Founder of Transform Capital, a late-stage growth fund built on an unprecedented philanthropic model that donates half the traditional GP carry to universities and nonprofits. With nearly 25 years in venture capital, he backed PayPal as one of its first institutional investors, led Series A investments in Kabbage (acquired by American Express), Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), and Waze (acquired by Google for $1.15B), and championed the thesis that real-time data would reshape lending, payments, and enterprise procurement. His four-factor investment framework - team, market, technology, and whether the company actually matters - reflects a philosophy that has made him one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable early-stage fintech investors.
Eyal Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Stampli, the Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform that processes over $100 billion in annual invoices for 1,700+ enterprises. A former SAP implementation specialist turned fintech founder, Feldman built Stampli around a simple belief: that AP should be a collaborative process, not a bureaucratic bottleneck. Under his leadership, Stampli has raised $145.7M in total funding, earned the #10 Best CEO of 2024 recognition from Comparably, and become a G2 Leader in 9 categories for AP automation software.
Eli Chait is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wholesail, a San Francisco-based B2B payment risk management platform modernizing accounts receivable for food and beverage distributors. His origin story is unusually grounded: at age 12, he was entering invoices for his father's restaurant in Los Angeles. That early hands-on encounter with the pain of paper-based B2B trade became the north star for his entire career - from co-founding Copilot (a restaurant analytics startup acquired by OpenTable) to leading Wholesail through a $22.6M Series A. With a team of repeat entrepreneurs forged at OpenTable, Wholesail is building the credit and payments network for the $1+ trillion US food distribution market.