Darragh Buckley is the founder and CEO of Increase, an enterprise-grade banking API company that lets technology businesses programmatically store, move, and reconcile money by connecting directly into the Federal Reserve's payment rails. He was Stripe's first employee, joining the Collison brothers - fellow natives of Limerick, Ireland - in 2010 to build the banking and money-movement foundations of the company. After leaving Stripe in 2016, he founded Increase (YC Summer 2020), which now processes well over $100 billion a year with a famously tiny team. A contrarian who believes in the staying power of community banks, he has personally acquired stakes in small Washington-state banks, including a 10%-plus position in Twin City Bank that triggered Federal Reserve disclosure.
Astra is a San Francisco-based fintech that gives developers a single API to move money instantly between bank accounts and debit cards. Built on rails like Visa Direct, RTP, FedNow and ACH, its platform lets fintechs, banks and enterprises embed instant disbursements, account funding and accelerated transfers without building their own payments stack - going live in about 30 days instead of six months. Founded in 2016 by Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan, Astra has processed more than $1 billion in lifetime payments and is backed by FPV Ventures, Nyca Partners and others.
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Marshall Hayner is the Founder and CEO of Metallicus, a San Francisco-based blockchain infrastructure company building compliant, regulation-forward digital banking tools for credit unions and financial institutions. A Bitcoin miner since 2009, Hayner pioneered social crypto payments with QuickCoin (the first Facebook-integrated Bitcoin wallet) in 2014, then spent a decade building Metallicus into the only blockchain company certified as a service provider for the Federal Reserve's FedNow instant payment rail. His company's flagship products - Metal Pay, Metal Blockchain, and the Digital Banking Network - sit at the intersection of traditional finance and decentralized infrastructure.
Modern Treasury is a San Francisco software company that builds payment operations infrastructure for businesses moving money at scale. Its API-first platform connects directly to banks and unifies ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and stablecoin rails behind one developer-friendly interface, with a real-time ledger and automated reconciliation built in. Founded in 2018 by three engineers who lived through the pain firsthand at a mortgage marketplace, the company has powered hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for customers like Gusto, Marqeta, Navan, ClassPass, and Procore.
Matt Marcus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based payment operations platform that processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for companies like Gusto, Navan, and Procore. A Dartmouth computer science grad and former competitive rower, Marcus spent a year at LendingHome building the payment system that processed over $3 billion in mortgage loans - and that experience became the blueprint for Modern Treasury. He co-founded the company in 2018 with Sam Aarons and Dimitri Dadiomov, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, and has raised $183M in total funding. In July 2025, he transitioned from CPO to CEO, steering Modern Treasury toward unified fiat and stablecoin payment rails following the acquisition of Beam.