cross-border-payments
(19)
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
Sourav Choraria
Sourav Choraria is the co-founder and CEO of Infinity (YC W24), a Bengaluru business banking platform that helps cross-border SMBs and startups send and receive international payments with multi-currency accounts, flat fees, and no FX markup. He built it with his brother Sidharth after watching their family business lose money to slow, opaque international transfers. Before Infinity he was head of growth at Paytm Money, where he helped scale the wealth platform to 20 million monthly users and launched India's first fixed-deposit-backed credit card.
Walid Mah'd
Walid Mah'd is the co-founder and CEO of Moreta (YC S24), a San Francisco fintech that lets international travelers pay with local QR networks in Asia without a bank account in every country. A former Mastercard Advisors payments consultant and Ivey Business School graduate, he built the company after feeling the friction of paying while backpacking across Southeast and East Asia.
Rushabh Shah
Rushabh Shah is the co-founder and co-CEO of AiPrise, a Y Combinator-backed (S22) global compliance platform that lets companies verify customers and businesses in more than 150 countries through a single interface. A former Meta engineer who worked on developer-focused products and payments, he started AiPrise in 2022 with Chaitanya Sarda after a weekend scramble to make a YC deadline. The company has raised roughly $14.6M, including a $12.5M Series A led by Headline in October 2025, and serves 150+ customers including Bridge (a Stripe company) and dLocal.
Ximena Aleman
Ximena Aleman is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Prometeo, the largest open banking API platform in Latin America. A former journalist from Uruguay, she pivoted from covering entrepreneurs to becoming one, building infrastructure that connects over 1,200 financial institutions across 11 countries through a single API. Under her leadership Prometeo has won the trust of banks like JP Morgan, Santander, Citi and BBVA and raised backing from PayPal Ventures, Samsung Next and others. She is a vocal advocate for financial inclusion and for founders from overlooked corners of the region.
Prajit Nanu
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.
Ian Krotinsky
Ian Krotinsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fin, a New York based payments company that uses stablecoin infrastructure to move large sums of money instantly across borders. A former quantitative portfolio manager and trader at Citadel, he and co-founder Aashiq Dheeraj first built TipLink, a tool for sending crypto with a link, before rebranding around a broader ambition: to build the payments app of the future for high-value transfers. In December 2025 the company raised a $17 million Series A led by Pantera Capital, with Sequoia and Samsung Next participating.
Kirill Gertman
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.
Maggie Wu
Maggie Wu is the CEO and co-founder of VelaFi, a stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure company that helps businesses move money across borders faster and cheaper than traditional banking rails. Born in China and now based in Frisco, Texas, she built her name in Latin America, where her earlier venture TruBit grew to more than 300,000 users. In January 2026 VelaFi raised a $20 million Series B led by XVC and Ikuyo, with backing from Alibaba Investment and BAI Capital, pushing total funding past $40 million as the company expands from Latin America into the United States and Asia.
Khalid Alomari
Khalid Alomari is the founder and CEO of Fintesa, a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that lets businesses collect compliant payments across 200+ countries in roughly ten minutes. A computer scientist by training and a cybersecurity engineer by trade, he moved from Amman to San Francisco to take Fintesa through 500 Global and Y Combinator's startup school, building cross-border payment rails for merchants tired of conversion fees.
Nahuel Candia
Nahuel Candia is the co-founder and CEO of Rebill, a payments-infrastructure company that lets global businesses process payments, payouts and financial operations across Latin America and the US without setting up local entities. A developer since age 14 who built three companies before 30, he took Rebill through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and raised roughly $3.6-3.7M from Tiger Global, SV Angel, SOMA Capital, Magma Partners and founders like Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and Dropbox's Arash Ferdowsi. He says Rebill was rejected by YC dozens of times before getting in, and that persistence is now part of the company's origin story.
Arnold Lee
Arnold Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere Labs, the software company behind SpherePay, a cross-border stablecoin payments API, and SphereNet, a Solana-virtual-machine settlement ledger built for regulated fintechs. A Columbia computer science grad who first stumbled into Bitcoin in 2009 trying to buy video games, he spent his early career in embedded systems for IoT startups before incorporating Sphere a week after the FTX collapse, off the back of a global Stripe hackathon win and a stint in Jump Crypto's incubator. Sphere now moves billions in annual volume through corridors legacy banking forgot - Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East - on the thesis that every payments company eventually becomes a compliance company.
Piero Risco
Piero Núñez Del Risco is the founder and CEO of Pana (YC S22), a cross-border neobank building borderless USD accounts and a zero-fee remittance network for the 62 million Latinos living in the United States. A Dominican operator who spent more than a decade inside Caribbean banking - including leading a 130-person team that rebuilt Scotiabank's digital platform for 2 million customers across 11 countries - he left the corner office to attack the 6% fee that immigrants pay to send money home. Pana lets people open a US bank account with just a passport, and has grown into a 'global bank on chain' blending fiat and stablecoins across 125 countries.
Sara Drakeley
Sara Drakeley is the CEO of Sentz (formerly MobileCoin), a privacy-focused stablecoin and global payments company based in Sacramento, California. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, she built animation pipelines at Walt Disney Animation Studios - the trees in Frozen, the water in Moana, the fur in Zootopia - then wrote trading infrastructure on Wall Street and joined SpaceX's simulation team before becoming the third engineering hire at MobileCoin in 2018. She rose from principal engineer to CTO to CEO, and now leads the company's push to make instant, low-cost, private cross-border payments accessible worldwide.
Ling Wu
Ling Wu is the founder and CEO of TBCASoft, the Silicon Valley company behind HIVEX, a blockchain-based cross-border payment network that has connected over 1.5 billion mobile payment users worldwide. A mathematician, physicist and engineer by training, Wu spent years at Oracle and BroadVision before betting that the world's telecom carriers - not banks - would become the rails for global digital money. He co-founded the SoftBank-backed Carrier Blockchain Study Group, raised $25M from Naver and SoftBank, and is now pushing regulated stablecoins into instant cross-border settlement through a 2025 partnership with Singapore's StraitsX.
Michael Wu
Michael Wu is the founder and CEO of Interlace (interlace.money), a Singapore-based card issuance and digital-asset payments platform that has issued more than 6 million cards across 180+ countries for over 12,000 enterprise clients. A Stanford-trained engineer who built software at Google, Dropcam, and PalmDrive before turning founder, Wu set out to collapse the months-long process of issuing branded payment cards into an API call, positioning stablecoins as the bridge between Web3 and traditional finance. In December 2024 Interlace raised $10 million in Series B1 funding led by Bitrock Capital.
Bernardo Garcia
Bernardo Garcia is the Co-Founder and COO of Félix Pago, a Miami-based fintech startup that lets Latino immigrants in the US send money home via WhatsApp in roughly 40 seconds. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Garcia built his career across consulting and Uber before earning his MBA at Wharton, where he met co-founder Manuel Godoy. Together they launched Félix in 2020, growing it to process over $1 billion in remittances in 2024 and raising a $75 million Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Manuel Godoy
Manuel Godoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform that uses USDC stablecoins and AI to let Latino immigrants send money home in minutes for a fraction of traditional costs. Born in Venezuela and educated at Caltech and Wharton, Godoy turned his own immigrant experience into a company that has processed over $1 billion in remittances, serves 400,000+ active users across nine countries, and raised $90.5M including a $75M Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Kristo Käärmann
Kristo Käärmann is the co-founder and CEO of Wise, the global fintech company making cross-border money transfers radically cheaper and faster. A former Deloitte and PwC consultant, he turned a personal frustration with hidden bank fees into one of Europe's most valuable tech companies—and became Estonia's first billionaire in the process.