Jason Mikula is the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, an independent newsletter that reaches more than 90,000 subscribers with critical, no-favors analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto. After more than a decade scaling consumer lending businesses at Enova, LendUp, and Goldman Sachs, he became one of the most-cited independent voices on Banking-as-a-Service and fintech regulation, writing the award-winning book on BaaS and co-hosting the Fintech Business Podcast. He works from outside Amsterdam, covering the U.S. fintech-banking ecosystem from across an ocean.
JIFFY.ai is an enterprise AI platform purpose-built for financial services — combining no-code app development, intelligent document processing, RPA, and generative AI into a unified HyperApp architecture. Founded in 2018 by Babu Sivadasan (formerly of Envestnet and Stamps.com) and a team of co-founders, the company targets wealth managers, banks, broker-dealers, and RIAs looking to automate client onboarding, account servicing, advisor workflows, and compliance operations without writing a line of code. With $105M+ in total funding and marquee customers reducing onboarding costs by 30% and advisor service time by 50%, JIFFY.ai sits at the intersection of AI hype and real financial-services plumbing.
Mercury is a San Francisco fintech that builds banking and financial software for startups and growth-stage companies. Through partner banks, it offers FDIC-insured checking and savings, corporate cards, treasury, venture debt, bill pay, and an API - aimed at founders who would rather not call a branch manager.
Lauren Myrick is the CEO and Co-founder of Found, a San Francisco-based fintech company building the all-in-one financial platform for self-employed workers and small businesses. After eight years at Square - joining as the company's second product manager and eventually running Square Payroll as General Manager - she co-founded Found in 2019 alongside Connor Dunn. The company has raised $125M+ across six rounds (most recently a $50M Series C led by Sequoia Capital in 2024) and now serves 770,000+ small business owners with integrated banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools.
Marcos Martinez is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fligoo, a San Francisco-based AI company building intelligent recommendation and predictive analytics solutions for financial institutions. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, he co-founded Fligoo in 2012 after earlier stints in software development. Under his technical leadership, Fligoo evolved from a social-graph gift recommendation engine into a WealthTech platform serving major institutions including Mastercard, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and Wells Fargo. Fligoo was named to the WealthTech100 in 2024 and has raised over $17M in funding, including a Series A round in 2020.
Heang Chan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Prelim, a San Francisco-based fintech that builds the digital onboarding operating system for banks and credit unions. A Stanford MBA and former Goldman Sachs banker who also helped build the mortgage platform at Blend used by 3 of the top 10 U.S. banks, Chan founded Prelim in 2017 after Y Combinator to solve the friction-filled account-opening workflows he watched slow down banks from the inside. Prelim now orchestrates 50+ banking integrations for institutions managing more than $5 trillion in assets, turning weeks-long onboarding into minutes.
DataWalk is a graph- and AI-enabled analysis and investigation platform that unifies disparate data sources so analysts at banks, insurers, and government agencies can spot hidden relationships, run no-code queries, and pursue fraud, money laundering, and threat investigations at scale.
Leo Patching is a serial fintech entrepreneur and the CEO and co-founder of Kompliant, a compliance orchestration platform for banks, payment facilitators, and financial institutions that was acquired by LegitScript in October 2025. With a track record spanning from solar energy to payments infrastructure, Patching has built a career around turning regulation into a competitive advantage - arguing that compliance is not a cost center but a growth engine for the modern financial services industry.
Rajeev Behera is the co-founder and CEO of Every (every.io), an all-in-one back-office platform for early-stage startups covering banking, payroll, bookkeeping, taxes, compliance, and incorporation. A serial entrepreneur who previously built and sold Reflektive - an HR performance management platform - to Learning Technologies Group after raising $100M+ from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and TPG, Behera returned from a two-year post-exit break with a mission to eliminate the back-office burden that consumed 30% of his own time as a founder. Every raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 and has grown to 150+ customers, with roughly half from the Y Combinator network.
Angela Strange is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads investments in fintech infrastructure, insurance, and AI applications in financial services. A mechanical engineer by training and elite marathon runner by heart, she coined the widely-cited thesis 'Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company' - arguing that new financial infrastructure will enable any company to embed financial services the way AWS democratized software. She joined a16z in 2014 after stints at Google (where she launched Chrome for Android and iOS) and travel startup Ruba.com (acquired by Google). She has board seats at companies including Moov, Sardine, Jeeves, Valon, and hyperexponential, and is co-chair of C100, which connects Canadian entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley.
William Hockey co-founded Plaid - the invisible rails that power Venmo, Coinbase, and thousands of fintech apps - then quietly bought a bank. As co-founder and co-CEO of Column, he built the only nationally chartered bank designed for developers, processing 40% of Bay Area fintech money movement with a 110-person team generating $200M in revenue and $100M+ in free cash flow. No outside investors, no VC dilution, just a former farm kid from Central California who learned that the best way to fix broken financial infrastructure is to own it.
Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, the digital banking platform trusted by 1 in 3 U.S. startups with $650M+ in annualized revenue and a $3.5B valuation. A Cambridge-trained computer scientist who came up through Y Combinator twice, he has built and sold two prior startups (Clickpass, Heyzap), made 350+ angel investments in companies like Airtable, Substack, and Rippling, and in April 2026 secured conditional OCC approval to charter Mercury Bank, N.A.
Peter Renton is one of fintech's original chroniclers - an Australian-born entrepreneur who turned a P2P lending hobby blog into LendIt, the world's largest fintech conference, and Fintech Nexus, a media empire reaching 225,000+ banking and fintech executives. After Fintech Nexus filed for Chapter 7 in 2024, he launched Renton & Co and continues hosting the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the longest-running one-on-one interview show in fintech, now past 628 episodes and 1 million downloads.
Rex Salisbury is the founder and solo general partner of Cambrian Ventures, a $20M early-stage fintech fund born out of one of the largest fintech founder communities in the US. A former Merrill Lynch banker turned bootcamp-trained software engineer turned a16z partner, Rex built his reputation by running grassroots fintech meetups for years before a single dollar of fund capital. His Cambrian newsletter reaches 20,000 subscribers, his founder-only Slack has 1,100+ members, and his Fund I achieved a ~50% seed-to-Series A graduation rate against a 15.4% industry average. Early backer of Deel, now a $10B+ decacorn.
Simon Taylor is a fintech operator, writer, and speaker who built the #1 weekly fintech newsletter Fintech Brainfood to 45,000+ subscribers while holding senior roles at Barclays, co-founding 11:FS (UK's leading fintech consultancy), and most recently joining Tempo - the Stripe and Paradigm-incubated payments blockchain - as GTM Lead. His famous thesis 'Fintech is only 1% finished' captured an industry's imagination, and his independently-written weekend newsletter has become required reading for bankers, founders, and investors globally.