embedded-payments
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Greater Sum Ventures Built a Private Equity Machine With No Fund Clock
The Knoxville firm turned one church-software roll-up into a repeatable playbook for buying, combining and operating unglamorous but essential software - without the forced exit date of a conventional fund.
The Private Equity Firm That Treats Payments Like Product
Blue Star Innovation Partners does not sell founders a distant board seat. It sells them a working session - then brings a payments playbook, an operator bench, and capital to the table.
The $625 Million Bet on Making Payments Feel Personal
Celero Commerce assembled a top-tier non-bank payments platform one acquisition at a time. Its sharper idea was to pair the machinery of modern commerce with something the industry keeps automating away: a person who answers.
Fortis Wants the Payment to Disappear - and the Workflow to Finally Make Sense
Fortis spent years buying the unglamorous pieces of payment infrastructure that businesses notice only when they break. Now it is turning those pieces into one embedded layer for ERP software, receivables, checkout and reconciliation.
The Payments Company You Rarely See - Even When It Moves $700 Billion
NMI built a large payments business by staying behind the curtain. Its white-label infrastructure lets software companies and payment specialists assemble, brand and monetize the route from merchant sign-up to checkout to payout.
Global Payments Inc.
The Atlanta payments veteran has rebuilt itself around one job: making commerce work for merchants. After the Worldpay deal, its reach runs from a food-truck handheld to the checkout systems behind global enterprises.
Clerq
Clerq is a New York-based fintech building an account-to-account (A2A) bank payments platform for high-ticket transactions. It lets merchants - starting with automotive and powersports dealerships - accept low-cost, guaranteed payments pulled directly from a customer's bank account, with card-like ease and no chargeback, fraud, or funding risk. Founded in 2022 by former Citadel and JP Morgan investors Truett Dwyer and Ben Markowitz, Clerq raised a $12M Series A led by 645 Ventures in October 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $21M.
ConnexPay
ConnexPay is a Plano, Texas payments-technology company that unifies the two traditionally separate halves of the payment process - accepting customer payments (PayIns) and issuing supplier payments via virtual cards (PayOuts) - into one platform, one contract and one reconciliation. Founded in 2017 by former U.S. Bank payments executive Bob Kaufman, it lets travel agencies, marketplaces, insurers and other 'high-risk' merchants use incoming card revenue to instantly fund outbound supplier payments, removing the need for pre-funded accounts and reducing risk while capturing card rebates.
Highline
Highline is a Dallas-based fintech that runs an intelligent payment network called Pay by Paycheck, which lets consumers automate bill and loan payments directly from their paychecks before the money reaches their bank accounts. By capturing funds through a payroll split at the moment payroll is run, Highline helps borrowers avoid missed payments, late fees and overdrafts while giving lenders and billers a more reliable way to get paid - expanding access to lower-cost credit for the roughly 40 million Americans who have steady jobs but thin or subprime credit files.
Method
Method is a financial connectivity platform that lets developers link, read, and repay a consumer's credit and liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans, mortgages and more - through a single API. Using only a phone number, Method connects to 20,000+ financial institutions, surfaces real-time balances, payoff quotes and due dates, and moves money directly to creditors. It powers embedded lending, refinancing, balance transfers and debt payoff for fintechs and lenders including SoFi, Aven, Bilt, Happy Money and Figure.
Geoff Brown
Geoff Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Highline, a Dallas-based fintech that runs a payments network pulling bill payments and loan repayments directly from a worker's paycheck instead of a bank account. A self-described numbers geek with a math and physics degree from the University of Florida, he spent two decades in consumer banking and credit risk at Capital One, Santander and Salary Finance before starting Highline in 2020. The company raised $13 million in Series A funding in 2022 and pitches payroll-linked payments as a way to cut missed payments and expand access to lower-cost credit.
Ascend
Ascend is a San Francisco-based financial operations platform purpose-built for the insurance industry. It automates the money workflows brokers, agencies, wholesalers, MGAs and carriers deal with every day - billing and invoicing, premium collection and financing, cash application, commission reconciliation and carrier payables - so businesses close their books faster and cut manual accounting work. Founded in 2021 by Andrew Wynn and Praveen Chekuri, the company is trusted by more than 4,000 insurance businesses, including over half of the 50 largest brokers in the US, and in 2026 agreed to merge with premium finance firm Honor Capital to form what the companies describe as insurance's first fully vertically integrated, AI-powered financial operations platform.
Spinwheel
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.
Boost Payment Solutions
Boost Payment Solutions is a New York-based fintech that quietly removes the friction from large commercial card payments. Founded in 2009 by payments veteran Dean M. Leavitt, Boost uses patented straight-through processing and a rules-based payment engine to let buyers pay with cards while suppliers get paid automatically, with the data and reconciliation already handled. Operating in dozens of countries and partnered with Visa and Mastercard, Boost has positioned itself as a leading independent infrastructure layer for B2B card payments.
Danielle Cohen-Shohet
Danielle Cohen-Shohet is the CEO and co-founder of GlossGenius, the all-in-one booking, payments and point-of-sale platform built for salons, spas and independent beauty professionals. A summa cum laude Princeton graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst, she taught herself to code and wrote the first version of the product after running a freelance makeup business out of her dorm room. Founded with co-founder Karim Butt and run alongside her twin sister Leah, GlossGenius now serves tens of thousands of beauty and wellness businesses, crossed roughly $100M in revenue, and reached a $510M valuation on its 2023 Series C.
Revela
Revela is a Detroit-based proptech company building an all-in-one property management platform that fuses double-entry, GAAP-grade accounting with leasing, maintenance, payments, reporting, and embedded banking. Founded in 2014 by Grant Drzyzga and bootstrapped for nearly a decade before raising a $9M Series A in 2023, Revela aims to bring liquidity and modern software to a historically low-margin, fragmented industry, serving managers of single-family, multifamily, affordable, commercial, and student housing across hundreds of thousands of units.
Finix
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
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
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.