freelancers
(7)
Tolu Alabi
Tolu Alabi is the co-founder and CEO of Cleva (YC W24), a USD banking platform that lets freelancers and businesses across Africa get paid in dollars and shield their earnings from local currency swings. Born and raised in Nigeria, she played competitive basketball before earning degrees at Grinnell College and Stanford GSB and building products at Stripe and Amazon. She also runs Next in Line Africa, a basketball nonprofit that teaches life skills to young athletes.
Cleva
Cleva is a USD banking platform that lets freelancers, remote workers and businesses in Africa - starting with Nigeria - open U.S. dollar accounts in their own name, receive international payments via ACH, wire, or stablecoins (USDC/USDT), and spend through a virtual dollar card. Founded in 2023 by Stripe and AWS alumni Tolu Alabi and Philip Abel, and backed by Y Combinator (W24), Cleva helps users get paid in dollars and hedge against local currency volatility.
HALA
HALA is a Riyadh-based fintech building the 'bank of the future' for small and medium enterprises across Saudi Arabia and the wider MENA region. Founded in 2018 by Esam AlNahdi and Maher Loubieh, it combines business IBAN accounts, card issuance, POS and soft-POS payment acceptance, expense management and SME financing into a single platform regulated by the Saudi Central Bank (SAMA). HALA serves more than 140,000 businesses, processes over $8 billion in annual transactions, and in September 2025 raised a $157 million Series B - one of the largest fintech Series B rounds in the Middle East - at a reported valuation near $900 million.
The best creatives I know hate selling.
A manifesto for talented creatives who freeze the moment a client asks 'what do you charge?' Written to promote Natural Born Seller, a full-day sales workshop led by Emmy-winning designer and The Futur founder Chris Do, the piece reframes selling as an act of service rather than manipulation. It walks through the limiting beliefs that keep skilled creatives broke - money shame, conflict avoidance, scope creep, wavering confidence - and answers the three objections most likely to keep a creative agency owner on the fence about attending the August 6, 2026 event in Vancouver.
Lilac Bar David
Lilac Bar David is the co-founder and CEO of Lili, a New York based financial platform that folds banking, invoicing, accounting and tax tools into a single app for small business owners. A banking and payments veteran of roughly two decades, she previously co-founded Pepper, Israel's first mobile bank, before launching Lili in 2018-2019 with Liran Zelkha. Under her leadership Lili has served hundreds of thousands of freelancers and small businesses, raised about $80 million from investors including Group 11 and Foundation Capital, and in recent years built out an Accountant AI tool while shifting focus toward larger, multi-employee businesses.
Found
Found is a San Francisco-based financial technology company that bundles business banking, automated bookkeeping, and tax tools into a single platform for self-employed Americans. Founded in 2019 by ex-Square executives Lauren Myrick and Connor Dunn, Found pairs an FDIC-insured business checking account (via Lead Bank) with real-time tax estimates, automatic expense categorization, invoicing, and quarterly tax payments - aimed at the 64 million Americans who work for themselves.
Ryan Hollander
Ryan Hollander is the CEO of Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter), the all-in-one creator management platform connecting enterprises with 50,000+ vetted creators, production companies, and agencies across 192 countries. Headquartered in New York, Glimmer manages billions in corporate content spending and has produced content for clients including Meta, CNN, Bloomberg, Hearst, and Airbnb. Hollander leads the company through its evolution from a video production marketplace into a full-stack creative workforce platform backed by $11.9M in total funding.