embedded-payments
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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.
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.
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.