fintech-founder
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Josip Rupena Is Teaching a Mortgage to Read a Wallet
The Milo founder began with a simple mismatch: wealthy people could buy American stocks, yet struggle to finance an American home. His answer is a lender built to understand the assets conventional underwriting overlooks.
The Godfather of Revenue Recognition Is Not Done Yet
He built the first revenue recognition software in 2009, sold it to Zuora, then walked away to do it again - properly this time. A story about second acts in an unglamorous corner of accounting.
Apurv Bansal Took the Long Way Back to Building
He sold a startup, went to Harvard, joined Google, became a venture capitalist, and still felt pulled toward the founder’s chair. Zenskar is what happened when Apurv Bansal finally stopped circling and chose a problem built for a long game.
Nicholas Hinrichsen Learned to Move Cars. Now He Moves Credit Unions.
A German golf prospect became a used-car founder, sold to Carvana, and came back for the least glamorous layer of finance: the moment a customer asks a credit union to say yes.
Mary Antony Is Teaching Financial Statements to Keep Their Own Books
After years spent watching expert accountants burn hours on formatting, cross-checking and document handoffs, the former controller built Inscope to give the work a reliable system of record.
Jordan Lee Is Turning the College Fund Into a Team Sport
A teacher changed Jordan Lee's trajectory. Now the Backer founder is trying to turn a tax-code tool into something families can understand, start, and build together.
Nguyen Nguyen Is Rewriting the Credit File
A Barclays credit-risk specialist saw what a missing credit history could cost. Thirteen years after coding a first score beside the Hudson, his company is trying to make lending see the people its paperwork misses.
Nik Talreja Is Turning Venture Capital’s Paper Trail Into Rails
A lawyer became an investor, discovered the paperwork was the product, and built Sydecar to make private-market deals feel less like bespoke legal projects and more like dependable infrastructure.
Danielle Pensack Learned to Build Fintech by Calling 150 Retirement Homes
Before Rightfoot built data infrastructure for lenders, its co-founder moved into a retirement community to test an entirely different idea. The experiment failed cleanly - and became the operating system for everything that followed.
Damián Scavo Is Teaching AI to Do the Homework of Money
Before financial AI became a category, Scavo had already spent two decades moving between code, markets and data. Streetbeat is his attempt to turn that unusual apprenticeship into an agent that can make financial work less manual - without pretending judgment has disappeared.
Colin Luce Is Building the Vault for Commerce’s Agentic Turn
After years inside fintech’s expanding platforms, Colin Luce made a contrarian bet: the most valuable layer in payments may be the neutral vault underneath them. Now Basis Theory is testing whether merchant-controlled data can keep commerce open when software starts shopping for us.
Brian Hassan Found a Fintech Company Inside the Tip Jar
An armored truck outside a San Francisco restaurant exposed a stubborn payment problem. Brian Hassan and his longtime co-founder turned that small contradiction into Kickfin - software built to move restaurant tips as quickly as the dinner check.
Caitlin Leksana Found a Startup in the Spreadsheet Nobody Wanted to Open
A mechanical engineer, a failed crypto startup and a hundred nervous cold messages led Caitlin Leksana to an overlooked corner of finance. Now she is building Fazeshift around a deceptively hard question: why is getting paid still managed by hand?
Ali Tabba Is Building a Money Agent That Can Actually Do the Chores
After an early chapter inside the company that became Zepto and a turn at BlackRock, Ali Tabba is betting that the next personal-finance interface will act on instructions, not merely display balances.
Altin Kadareja
After years inside European finance, the Cardo AI founder turned an everyday frustration - fragmented data and manual loan workflows - into a company spanning New York, London, Milan and a Balkan tech hub.
Allen Osgood
A former Coinbase product manager went looking for a neglected corner of finance. He found dormant accounts, fifty-state rulebooks, and a chance to keep customers connected to their own money.
Srinivas Sarkar
Srinivas Sarkar is the co-founder and CEO of Coupl, a Y Combinator-backed neobank built for couples in India. After a stint as a management consultant at EY and a Founder in Residence run at Entrepreneur First, he set out to fix a gap he kept noticing: banking products for couples had not kept pace with how couples actually live. Coupl offers a zero-balance digital joint account that opens in under a minute and serves married, unmarried, and LGBTQ+ partners alike. The company has grown to 80,000+ couples and 300+ crore in transactions without paid advertising. Sarkar is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, an Entrepreneur 35 Under 35 listee, a BITS Pilani alumnus, and a three-time TEDx speaker.
Utkarsh Sinha
Utkarsh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) fintech building a platform for traders outside the US to trade perpetual futures on American stocks with up to 20x leverage, self-custodial wallets, and local-currency onboarding. Raised in a middle-class family in Ranchi, he studied EECS at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at Columbia, worked at McKinsey and in engineering roles, and previously built Martian Wallet from his Columbia dorm room, scaling it to 2M+ installs and a $2B+ transaction volume before it was acquired.
Sergey Savastiouk
Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Tickeron, a Reno-based platform that pairs artificial intelligence with plain-language explanation to give self-directed investors and advisors trading signals, pattern recognition, and automated 'AI robots.' A former applied-mathematics professor at Santa Clara University with two prior startups behind him, he turned the losses of the 2008 crisis into a mission to hand retail investors the kind of algorithmic tools once reserved for institutions.
Chris Yu
Chris Yu is the co-founder and CEO of SignalPlus, a Hong Kong-based software firm building institutional-grade trading and risk-management infrastructure for crypto options and derivatives. A former macro trader at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, he spotted that crypto options represented less than half a percent of perpetual-contract volume and set out to close that gap. Since founding SignalPlus with James Shan in 2021, Yu has grown the platform into a tool used by firms including Cumberland, FalconX, Galaxy, and Goldman Sachs, and helped expand the crypto options market several times over.
Cody Barbo
Cody Barbo is the founder and CEO of Trust & Will, the leading digital estate planning and settlement platform in the United States. A two-time founder from San Diego, he launched Trust & Will in 2017 to make wills, trusts, and estate planning affordable and accessible for everyday families. Under his leadership the company has grown past one million users, raised more than $80 million in venture capital, and partners with names like AARP, Northwestern Mutual, UBS, and USAA. Before Trust & Will he founded Industry, a professional network for the hospitality sector, and served as CEO and president of Associated Students at San Diego State University.
Cole Riccardi
Cole Riccardi is the founder and CEO of Authentic, a New York based insurtech startup that lets software platforms and affinity groups launch their own branded insurance programs. A former investor at Aquiline Capital Partners and a Notre Dame finance graduate, he left the investing side of insurance in 2022 to build what he calls 'captive-in-a-box' - turnkey infrastructure that brings captive insurance, once reserved for large corporations, to gyms, restaurants, salons and other small businesses. Authentic has raised roughly $16 million, including an $11 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital.
Colin MacNaught
Colin MacNaught is the CEO and co-founder of BondLink, a Boston-based fintech company that brings modern technology and transparency to the municipal bond market. Before starting BondLink in 2015 with technologist Carl Query, he spent seven years managing debt for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, issuing close to $25 billion in bonds and notes and earning two national Deal of the Year awards from The Bond Buyer. He studied public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and built BondLink to give public-sector issuers digital tools to reach investors, improve disclosure, and lower borrowing costs for taxpayers.
Danyal Özdüzenciler
Danyal Özdüzenciler is the co-founder and CEO of Capsa AI, a London- and New York-based startup building what it calls an AI operating system for the private capital industry. A former private equity and investment banking professional with Turkish-German roots, he founded Capsa AI in 2024 with Callum Downie after a first failed startup taught him hard lessons about grit. In June 2026 the company raised an $18m Series A, bringing total funding to about $20m, on the back of 14x year-on-year revenue growth and a 100% customer renewal rate.
Ferdinand Roberts
Ferdinand Roberts is the founder and CEO of Asset Class, a fintech company building an end-to-end software platform for private capital firms - covering fundraising, investor relations, investor portals, deal flow, portfolio management and fund administration. A technology executive with more than 25 years in the sector and senior roles at Yahoo!, Cisco and Ariba, he launched Asset Class in 2020 after seeing firsthand how disjointed private-market operations were while running capital markets for a private equity firm. In 2024 the company raised an $11.6M Series A led by Canapi Ventures, serving 300+ funds and around $33 billion in serviced assets across offices in Dublin, New York, London and Atlanta.
Hugo Finkelstein
Hugo Finkelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Rise, a global payroll and compliance company that lets businesses pay contractors and employees across 190+ countries in local currency, stablecoins, or crypto. What started at Babson College as a campus buy-and-sell app turned into a career in crypto community-building and, eventually, a payroll platform that has processed more than $1 billion in payments. Rise raised a $6.3M Series A in November 2024 led by Draper Associates and Polymorphic Capital, and Finkelstein has become one of the clearest voices arguing that the real stablecoin use case is not trading, it is payroll.
John Clendening
John Clendening is the founder and CEO of Earned (Earned Wealth), a tech-enabled financial services firm built exclusively for doctors, dentists, and their medical practices. After more than two decades running large financial businesses, including a stint as CEO of Blucora and senior leadership at Charles Schwab where he ran Schwab Bank, he started Earned to fold wealth management, tax, accounting, insurance, and practice services into a single platform for healthcare professionals. The company has raised roughly $225 million and grown past 240 employees, and it landed on Newsweek and Forbes advisory-firm rankings in 2025.
Joshua Frank
Joshua Frank is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie, a New York-based data and analytics company that has become a core information provider for institutional crypto investors. The Tie's SigDev Terminal and APIs deliver real-time sentiment, news, and market data to hedge funds, trading desks, banks, and exchanges. Frank left a post-trade consulting role at SS&C Technologies in 2018 to build the company full time, and has since grown it into one of the most widely used data platforms serving the professional side of digital assets.
Karthik Nandyal
Karthik Nandyal is the co-founder and co-CEO of CredCore, a New York vertical-AI company building an end-to-end platform for the roughly $5 trillion enterprise debt capital markets. A two-time founder and long-time capital markets technologist, he previously ran product and R&D for Reliance Jio's Financial Innovation Group and held roles at BNP Paribas, Instinet (Reuters), and IBM, and earlier co-founded the fashion visual-search startup Styloot. In February 2025 CredCore raised a $16M Series A led by Avataar Ventures, and its AI platform now supports oversight of more than $650B in assets under management.
Khaled Bitar
Khaled Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Avtal, an Austin-based fintech building a white-labeled, AI-powered digital collections platform for third-party debt collection agencies. In March 2026 the company announced $24 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by S3 Ventures. Before Avtal, Bitar co-founded and ran LeftLane Software, a subprime auto lending platform, led Supply Operations at ServiceChannel (acquired by Fortive for $1.2B), and spent four years as a consultant at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.