new-york-fintech
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Will Messina Went Looking for Debit-Card Rewards. He Found a $93 Trillion Trust Problem.
A broke college student wondered why debit cards earned no points. The detour that followed led him beneath checkout, into the slow machinery of ACH, and toward a harder question: can a bank payment be trusted before it moves?
Andres Garcia-Amaya Put Wall Street on the Other Side of the Table
His parents needed advice they could trust. His old industry gave them a maze. So the former J.P. Morgan strategist built Zoe - first as a matchmaker, then as the operating system behind the relationship.
Arcady Lapiro’s Second Act Is a Box of Banking Legos
After helping build a European digital bank through the dot-com bust and 9/11, the French-born founder is trying to give community banks a way around the software they cannot afford to replace.
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.
Aaron Schumm
He built the plumbing behind America's savings accounts - the 401(k)s, 529s and state programs most people never think about - by betting that the boring middle of finance was the biggest opportunity nobody wanted.
Casey Powers
Casey Powers is the CEO of Climb Credit, a New York-based fintech that finances career-focused and vocational education for students of all credit profiles. She rose to the top job in February 2022 after three years as Climb's Chief Operating Officer, bringing more than 15 years of experience across investment banking and mission-driven fintech startups. A vocal advocate for skills-based hiring, Powers has centered her leadership on expanding access to affordable education that improves earning potential for underserved learners and career switchers.
Daragh Murphy
Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.
Agora Financial Technologies
Agora Financial Technologies (formerly Agora Services) is a New York-based banking-as-a-service and embedded-fintech provider that lets community banks and credit unions launch modern digital banking products without ripping out their legacy core. Its core-agnostic, cloud-native platform ships white-label mobile apps, card programs, and API access for niche segments like teens, families, gig workers, SMBs, and seniors - typically in weeks rather than the multi-year timelines of traditional core replacements. Founded in 2018 by fintech veteran Arcady Lapiro, the company positions itself as a way for smaller financial institutions to compete with challenger banks on cost and speed.
Basic Capital
Basic Capital is a New York fintech building a modernized 401(k) and IRA platform that lets everyday workers finance their retirement investments rather than only contribute out of pocket. For every dollar a saver puts in, the company supplies supplemental capital - roughly four additional dollars - so contributions are deployed into diversified portfolios of ETFs, bonds, and access to alternatives like private credit. Founded by former Goldman Sachs banker Abdul Al-Asaad, it positions itself as the first platform to bring financing and alternative assets into tax-advantaged retirement accounts, and raised a $25M Series A in August 2025 led by Forerunner and Lux Capital.
Climb Credit
Climb Credit is a New York-based fintech lender that finances career-focused education such as coding bootcamps, trucking, healthcare, cosmetology and aviation programs. It partners with vocational schools to offer private loans and interest-free recurring payment plans, using an AI-driven credit model built on more than 150 data points so applicants with limited credit history can still qualify. Founded in 2014, Climb has funded tens of thousands of learners and vets partner schools to ensure programs actually improve graduates' earning potential.
Earned
Earned is a New York-based financial services firm built exclusively for doctors, dentists, and their practices. It combines wealth management, tax preparation and planning, accounting, retirement plans, insurance, and legal coordination into a single tax-smart platform, pairing an app and digital tools with fiduciary human advisors. Founded in 2021 and led by former Blucora and Charles Schwab executive John Clendening, Earned has grown through a mix of organic client growth and acquisitions of healthcare-focused financial firms, reaching roughly 20,000 clients and $3.9 billion in assets under management by mid-2026.
Exponent
Exponent is a New York-based fintech building a financial operating system for America's franchise operators. It combines expansion and acquisition lending, a franchise-focused corporate charge card, and an AI-powered accounting suite so multi-unit operators - the people running dozens of Burger Kings, Dunkins, or Wendy's - can get capital faster and see real-time financials without waiting for month-end reports. Founded in 2023 and led by former Visa and Stripe executive Sohel Roopani, Exponent serves 100+ operators representing over 10,000 locations and raised $40M in equity and credit in 2026.
Farther
Farther is a New York-based technology-driven wealth management firm that pairs human financial advisors with a proprietary 'Intelligent Wealth Platform.' Founded in 2019 by Taylor Matthews and Brad Genser, the company gives advisors an all-in-one digital ecosystem for financial planning, investing, tax optimization, and estate planning, while offering clients a family-office-style experience. After a $150 million Series D led by General Atlantic in 2026, Farther has grown to roughly $23 billion in recruited assets and ranks among the fastest-growing financial services firms in the United States.
Lili
Lili is a New York-based financial technology company that runs an all-in-one business banking platform for small businesses. It bundles a fee-free business checking account with built-in accounting, expense management, invoicing, automated tax savings and high-yield savings - collapsing tools that owners would otherwise stitch together. Founded in 2018 by Lilac Bar David and Liran Zelkha, Lili started serving freelancers and solopreneurs and has since repositioned toward growing, multi-employee small businesses. Banking services are provided through partner bank Sunrise Banks, N.A., Member FDIC.
Masterworks
Masterworks is a New York fintech that lets everyday investors buy fractional shares in multimillion-dollar blue-chip paintings by artists such as Basquiat, Picasso, Warhol and Banksy. Founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Scott Lynn, the company buys individual artworks, registers each as a public offering with the SEC, and sells shares for as little as $20, then holds the work for several years before selling it and distributing proceeds. It reached unicorn status in 2021 after a $110M Series A and has grown to more than one million members.
Percent
Percent is a New York-based fintech company building the technology infrastructure for the private credit market. Its platform digitizes the full lifecycle of private credit transactions - sourcing, structuring, syndication, surveillance and servicing - connecting corporate and asset-based borrowers, underwriters and accredited investors on a single, transparent marketplace. Founded in 2018 (originally as Cadence) by Nelson Chu, Percent has powered roughly $2 billion in transaction volume and offers short-duration, high-yield private credit deals with lower minimums than traditional channels.
Provable Markets
Provable Markets is a New York-based financial technology company modernizing the securities lending and securities finance markets. Through Aurora, its SEC-registered, vertically integrated Alternative Trading System, it combines encrypted real-time order matching, automated post-trade lifecycle management, and connectivity to central clearing (NSCC CCP) and settlement (DTC) infrastructure. Founded in 2020 by CEO Matthew Cohen and rooted in cryptographic research on secure multi-party computation, the company aims to replace the instant-message-and-spreadsheet workflows of a roughly trillion-dollar market with cloud-native, low-latency, transparent trading.
Transient.AI
Transient.AI is a New York-based fintech startup building what it calls a Trusted AI Operating System for capital markets - a compliant, explainable intelligence layer that unifies fragmented legacy systems for hedge funds, asset managers, RIAs, and sell-side trading desks. Founded by former traders and technologists from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, and McKinsey, the company ships a suite of enterprise SaaS platforms (Caddie.AI, ClarityRIA, CapFlo.AI, Sales+) plus specialized AI agents for trade ideas, surveillance, AML, and term sheets. In May 2026 it raised its Series A led by NEXT Investors to scale deployment inside regulated financial institutions.
Vestwell
Vestwell is a New York-based fintech that operates as digital savings infrastructure for the American workplace. Founded in 2016 by Aaron Schumm, it provides an API-driven recordkeeping and administration platform that lets employers, financial advisors, payroll providers, and state governments offer 401(k), 403(b), IRA, 529 education, ABLE disability, and emergency savings accounts. By 2026 the company administered more than $50B in assets for over 2 million savers, powered the majority of state-facilitated retirement programs in the U.S., and raised a $385M Series E to expand the modern savings economy.
Zoe Financial
Zoe Financial is a New York-based wealthtech company that connects individuals and families with vetted, independent fiduciary financial advisors while giving those advisors an all-in-one platform to run their practices. Founded in 2018 by former J.P. Morgan executive Andres Garcia-Amaya, Zoe pairs a rigorous advisor-matching service - it screens out roughly 95% of applicant advisors - with wealth-management software that handles account opening, funding, automated rebalancing, tax-efficient investing, direct indexing, and commission-free fractional trading. The company raised a $29.6M Series B in 2025 led by Sageview Capital, bringing total funding to about $45M.
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.
Henry Adams
Henry Adams is US CEO and Global Head of Capital Markets at TreasurySpring, a London-founded fintech that opens up the multi-trillion dollar wholesale money markets to corporates and institutions. He joined the founding team at the start of 2018 after roughly a decade running secured financing portfolios at RBC and earlier work at BlackRock, and now leads the company's push into the United States from New York. His background sits at the intersection of repo trading, fixed income and product, which he channels into building the market plumbing behind TreasurySpring's Fixed-Term Funds.
Jonathan Birnbaum
Jonathan Birnbaum is the founder and CEO of OpenYield, a New York-based fixed income marketplace that brings an equity-like, fully automated trading experience to bonds. A former US credit trading COO at Morgan Stanley and fixed income execution lead at Bridgewater Associates, he later helped build consumer investing platforms as general manager of SoFi Invest and founding COO of Domain Money. He founded OpenYield in 2023 to make bonds cheap and easy to trade for retail investors, backed by a 2026 Series A of more than $6 million from investors including LeveL Markets, Draper Associates, Canapi Ventures and Clocktower Ventures.
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.
Kirill Gertman
Kirill Gertman is the co-founder and CEO of Conduit, a New York-based B2B cross-border payments platform that settles international transactions using stablecoins. After more than a dozen years building fintech products in banking and startups - including product leadership roles at BRD (acquired by Coinbase) and Eco - he launched Conduit in 2021. The company pivoted from crypto-backed DeFi analytics to cross-border payments after the 2022 market downturn, and now processes more than $10 billion in annualized volume across a network of 20-plus banks in nine countries. In May 2025, Conduit raised a $36 million Series A co-led by Dragonfly Capital and Altos Ventures.
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.
Maik Wehmeyer
Maik Taro Wehmeyer is the co-founder and CEO of Taktile, an AI decision platform that helps banks, insurers, and fintechs automate high-stakes risk decisions like credit underwriting, onboarding, fraud detection, and claims. A Harvard-trained statistician and former QuantCo, McKinsey, and Bosch alum, he started Taktile in 2020 with fellow Harvard classmate Maximilian Eber after they repeatedly rebuilt the same decision infrastructure for enterprise clients. In June 2026 the company raised a $110M Series C led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing total funding to roughly $189M, and now serves more than 150 financial institutions from offices in New York, London, and Berlin.
Matthew Cohen
Matthew Cohen is the co-founder and chief executive of Provable Markets, a New York fintech running Aurora, an SEC-registered Alternative Trading System for securities lending. After 15 years trading equity finance at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Jefferies, and Nomura, Cohen partnered with cryptographer Thomer Gil in 2020 to apply secure multi-party computation to a market that had run for decades on phone calls, spreadsheets, and information leakage. In 2022 Provable ran the first securities lending transaction cleared through DTCC's SFT service. In May 2024 the company raised an $8M Series A led by Dialectic Capital Management.
Zachary Conway
Zachary Conway is the founder and CEO of Seeds, a New York-based fintech that helps financial advisors turn client values into personalized, automated investment portfolios. A former Standard & Poor's editorial manager who grew up inside his father's wealth-advisory firm, Conway built Seeds to close the gap between what investors believe and what they actually own. Under his leadership the platform crossed $1 billion in assets under management within three years and raised a $10 million Series A led by Portage in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $16.5 million.
Checker
Checker is a New York-based financial infrastructure company that lets regulated banks, fintechs and payment providers plug into stablecoins, digital-asset liquidity, cross-border payments, treasury and credit through a single API. Founded in 2023, it stitches together 50+ liquidity and infrastructure providers across 75+ currencies, and processed roughly $3 billion in volume over its first year - about 1% of global B2B stablecoin payment flows. In May 2026 it raised $8 million from Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures and Framework Ventures to expand its network across Brazil, Kenya, Hong Kong and the United States.