mobile-payments
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How a Forgotten Wallet Turned Into America's Verb for Money
Venmo turned paying a friend back into a social ritual - complete with emojis and a public feed. Fifteen years later, "just Venmo me" is how a generation moves money.
BuyPower
BuyPower is a Nigerian bill-payment platform that lets people buy prepaid and postpaid electricity tokens - plus airtime, data and TV subscriptions - online and through its mobile app, 24/7. Founded in 2016 in Abuja after its founders grew tired of queueing at utility offices, it integrates directly with Nigeria's electricity distribution companies (DisCos) and has grown into a cash-flow-positive business reporting roughly $20.6M in revenue by the end of 2024. It was the first company from Northern Nigeria backed by Y Combinator (W17).
Spring in Africa
Spring in Africa is a Nigerian-rooted fintech that lets people and small businesses send, receive, and hold money across borders in both fiat and crypto. It began as Wallet.ng, grew into Wallets Africa, and in 2023 launched Spring, a multi-currency wallet that pairs an instant account number, cashback, and payment links with Ethereum and stablecoin transactions shown in plain USD. Backed by Y Combinator (W19), Michael Seibel, Microtraction, Samurai Incubate, and Mozilla, the company has processed millions of dollars a month for tens of thousands of consumer and business accounts.
YouTrip
YouTrip is a Singapore-based fintech that operates a multi-currency mobile wallet and companion Mastercard prepaid card, letting travelers and everyday spenders hold and exchange 10 currencies in-app and pay in more than 150 currencies overseas at wholesale FX rates with no added transaction fees. Founded in 2018 by Caecilia Chu and Arthur Mak, the company has expanded from consumers into SMEs through YouBiz, a corporate multi-currency card, and processes roughly US$15 billion in annual transaction volume across Singapore, Thailand and Australia.
Mike Love
Mike Love is the CEO and a founding team member of Fintiv, an Austin-based fintech that builds patented digital wallet infrastructure bridging traditional finance, loyalty, and Web3. A computer scientist by training and a career-long payments architect, he helped lead technology transformation at First Data (Fiserv) before joining Fintiv in 2012, and also founded Cloud Payments Network. He describes himself as a serial technology entrepreneur with over four decades in TMT and work across 75+ countries.
Upped Events Inc.
Upped Events is a Philadelphia-based, software-only event management and payments platform that bundles ticketing, contactless mobile payments, on-site point-of-sale, CRM, mapping, staff and partner management, and real-time analytics into one system. Built for food and drink festivals, fairs, conventions, and community events, Upped aims to raise attendee spend and organizer ROI while cutting the number of tools a team has to juggle. Founded in 2020 by Mark Kozlowski, Louis Blitzman, and Filip Risteski, the company was acquired by Events.com in May 2025.
Clickatell
Clickatell is a chat commerce and messaging platform that helps brands talk to and transact with customers across SMS, WhatsApp and other channels. Founded in 2000 in Cape Town, it was the first company to wire businesses on the internet to consumers on mobile phones using SMS in four lines of code. Twenty-five years later it powers chat banking, tokenized WhatsApp payments and Chat-2-Pay with Visa for over 10,000 customers worldwide.
Amit Jhawar
Amit Jhawar is the CEO of Attentive, the AI-powered SMS and mobile marketing platform. Before martech, he spent a decade building payments: he was among the first 30 employees at Braintree, served as its CFO and COO, engineered the acquisition of Venmo, and then ran Venmo as CEO after PayPal bought the business. A former Accel partner, he joined Attentive as President in 2021 and was promoted to CEO in June 2023, where he has steered the company from SMS marketing into a broader AI-driven customer engagement platform.
TBCASoft
TBCASoft is a Silicon Valley blockchain company building a consortium-based distributed ledger that lets telecom carriers, mobile payment apps and banks interoperate across borders. Its HIVEX payment network lets travelers pay with their home QR-code wallet abroad without merchants changing POS systems, while the CBSG Consortium and CCIS identity framework extend the same trust rails to digital identity and authentication. Founded in 2016 by Ling Wu, it is backed by SoftBank and Naver and connects payment apps reaching tens of millions of users across Asia.
Ling Wu
Ling Wu is the founder and CEO of TBCASoft, the Silicon Valley company behind HIVEX, a blockchain-based cross-border payment network that has connected over 1.5 billion mobile payment users worldwide. A mathematician, physicist and engineer by training, Wu spent years at Oracle and BroadVision before betting that the world's telecom carriers - not banks - would become the rails for global digital money. He co-founded the SoftBank-backed Carrier Blockchain Study Group, raised $25M from Naver and SoftBank, and is now pushing regulated stablecoins into instant cross-border settlement through a 2025 partnership with Singapore's StraitsX.
Sentz Global
Sentz (formerly MobileCoin) is a San Francisco-based fintech building a free, self-custodial mobile wallet that lets people send, save, receive and earn in stablecoins. Its dollar-pegged eUSD moves money across borders in seconds for a fraction of a cent, with end-to-end encryption and full user custody. Used in 180+ countries with deep traction in Nigeria, Sentz targets freelancers, remote workers and families sending remittances, and offers up to 8% yield through Sentz Earn.
Kathleen Schnering
Kathleen Schnering is the Chief Executive Officer of Clover Network, one of the largest cloud-based point-of-sale platforms in the United States. Under the Fiserv umbrella, Clover serves more than 800,000 merchants across retail, restaurant, and services verticals, processing hundreds of billions in payments annually. Schnering leads a platform generating over $2.7 billion in annual revenue with a workforce of approximately 1,500 employees, steering Clover's expansion into international markets and value-added services as it targets $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.
Manuel Godoy
Manuel Godoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform that uses USDC stablecoins and AI to let Latino immigrants send money home in minutes for a fraction of traditional costs. Born in Venezuela and educated at Caltech and Wharton, Godoy turned his own immigrant experience into a company that has processed over $1 billion in remittances, serves 400,000+ active users across nine countries, and raised $90.5M including a $75M Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.
Noureddine Tayebi
Noureddine Tayebi is the founder and CEO of Yassir, North Africa's most valuable tech startup and the leading super app for francophone Africa. Born in Algiers in 1977, he earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University after completing a master's degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spent eight years at Intel in Silicon Valley accumulating over 50 patents before founding InSense, a nano-motion sensor startup acquired by Mojo Vision in 2018. In 2017, he co-founded Yassir, which has grown to serve 8 million+ users across 45 cities in six countries, offering ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and fintech services. Yassir has raised $193.25 million in total, including a historic $150M Series B led by Mary Meeker's BOND, cementing Tayebi's position as a defining figure in Africa's digital economy.
Steve Schultz
Steve Schultz is a General Partner at Diagram, a Montreal-based venture builder and fund focused on fintech, web3, and climate tech. With over two decades of experience spanning product management, startup operations, and venture investing, he has navigated every stage of the financial technology stack - from building Yahoo! Finance's product strategy to steering Check (a mobile payments startup) through a $360M acquisition by Intuit, to leading Amazon Web Services' landmark partnership with Y Combinator. Now based in Menlo Park, California, he anchors Diagram's US presence and brings a rare combination of operator instincts and investor pattern-recognition to early-stage founders.
Brian Bogosian
Brian Bogosian is President, CEO, and Chairman of Sticky.io, a San Francisco-based headless CRM and subscription payments platform that processes over $12 billion annually and powers 72 million+ subscriptions. A veteran technology executive, he previously led Good Technology (formerly Visto) as Chairman, President & CEO for a decade, growing it to become the industry's first mobile enterprise unicorn valued at $1.25 billion with 500+ employees in 10 countries. He founded Salt Technology and acquired LimeLight CRM - which he rebranded as Sticky.io in 2020 - to build a comprehensive payment orchestration and ecommerce retention platform backed by $90 million in debt financing from Goldman Sachs Asset Management and others.