instant-payments
(3)
Will Messina
Will Messina is the co-founder and CEO of GrailPay, a New York-based fintech building the risk and intelligence layer for bank payments. He started the company as a broke college kid at Boston College who wanted people to pay straight from their bank accounts, then pivoted from a consumer idea into the unglamorous plumbing of ACH: fraud detection, account verification, and settlement certainty. In June 2026 GrailPay raised a $10.5M Series A led by MissionOG to scale its Payments Identity Network, which covers over 99% of US bank accounts and aims to become the trust layer for instant and agentic B2B payments.
Gil Akos
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.
Dylan Massey
Dylan Massey is the co-founder and CEO of Interchecks, a New York-based instant-payment platform that moves deposits and withdrawals for sportsbooks, lenders, fintechs and banks. A former Goldman Sachs analyst and University of Chicago economics grad, he started the company in 2016 and has built it into infrastructure that has processed more than $50 billion, powering money movement for names like FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Credit Karma Money. In 2022 Interchecks raised a $16M Series B co-led by Senator Investment Group and Standard Investments.