Finix is a San Francisco-based payments infrastructure company that gives software platforms, marketplaces, and retailers the tools to own their payments end-to-end. Built around a no-code/low-code PayFac-as-a-Service model and a developer-friendly API, Finix lets SaaS companies monetize payments, manage merchants, and route money across cards, ACH, and wallets without becoming a registered payment facilitator themselves.
Richie Serna is the CEO and co-founder of Finix, a full-stack payments infrastructure company he built from the ground up in San Francisco. A Harvard-educated son of Mexican immigrant parents from Santa Ana, California, Serna left management consulting at Booz & Company, taught himself to code, and joined Balanced - the first payments API for marketplaces - before founding Finix in 2015. Today, Finix has raised $205.5M in total funding (including a $75M Series C in October 2024) and has become a direct-connection payment processor competing with Stripe, Adyen, and Braintree, serving software platforms and marketplaces processing billions of dollars annually.
Fred Helou is the founder and CEO of Vagaro, a cloud-based business management platform used by over 75,000 beauty, fitness, and wellness businesses across four countries. Born in Beirut in 1969, he escaped the Lebanese Civil War at 18, arrived in the United States penniless after being pickpocketed in France, and worked his way up from a $5-an-hour pickup boy to director of software development before being laid off in the 2008 recession — the catalyst that led him to build what is now a billion-dollar company. Vagaro has processed over $15 billion in payments, booked over 600 million appointments, and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a 2021 reinvestment by FTV Capital.