new-york-fintech
(23)
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.
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.
Allan Brik
Allan Brik is the CEO and managing founder of Everysk, a New York fintech building intelligent automation and risk workflows for capital markets. A structural engineer turned quant turned operator, he spent three decades managing risk at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the $14 billion hedge fund allocator Arden Asset Management before founding Everysk in 2013. He holds a PhD in Computer Aided Engineering from MIT and argues that cloud computing, open APIs, and agentic AI are quietly dismantling the spreadsheets and data silos that have governed investment management for decades.
Jack Chong
Jack Chong is the co-founder and CEO of Checker, a New York fintech that gives banks and payment companies a single API to reach the world's stablecoin and digital-asset liquidity. An Oxford PPE graduate who once trained to be a Chinese diplomat in the Arab world, he co-wrote one of the industry's first rigorous primers on real-world-asset tokenization before building Checker, which moved more than $3 billion in volume in under a year and raised $8M led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures and Framework Ventures.
Dean Leavitt
Dean M. Leavitt is the founder and CEO of Boost Payment Solutions, a New York fintech he launched in 2009 to build commercial card and B2B payment rails for large enterprises. A 30-plus-year payments veteran who previously ran public and bankruptcy-rescued processing companies, he spotted a vacuum in the roughly $125 trillion global B2B market and built patented straight-through processing technology now used across 45-plus countries by more than half the Fortune 100. Boost has landed on the Inc. 5000 five times and raised a $22 million Series C led by Invictus Growth Partners in 2021.
Jaimeson Rice
Jaimeson Rice is the CEO of Pinwheel, the New York fintech that has positioned itself as the income layer for financial services, connecting banks and fintechs to over 1,500 payroll platforms covering nearly 80% of U.S. paychecks. He stepped into the top job in July 2025 after three years as the company's CFO and chief of staff, succeeding co-founder Kurtis Lin. A Princeton engineer and Harvard MBA who passed through Goldman Sachs and Bain before founding his own SaaS CRM startup, Vlaris, Rice is now steering Pinwheel through marquee wins with KeyBank, Robinhood, DoorDash, and MoneyLion and the launch of its Switch Kit and Bill Navigator products.
Jake Cahan
Jake Cahan is the founder and CEO of January, a New York fintech rebuilding the debt-collection industry around compliance and compassion instead of harassment. Founded in 2016 (originally as Debtsy), January uses an AI-driven platform to help creditors recover money while treating borrowers like people, not criminals. After a slow, hard-fought start convincing credit unions and banks, Cahan raised a $12M Series B in December 2023 and has helped hundreds of thousands of Americans resolve debt. A Brown computer-science background and a stint as a venture investor at Third Prime preceded the company that has become his decade-long obsession.
Neal Desai
Neal Desai is the CEO and co-founder of Kafene, a New York fintech that lets people without prime credit lease-to-own furniture, appliances, electronics and tires at the point of sale. A molecular biology major from Princeton who spent more than a decade trading equity derivatives on Wall Street, he later became CFO of powersports lender Octane before spending six months methodically studying 45-plus specialty finance niches and choosing lease-to-own. Kafene approves applicants in seconds for an average of roughly $2,700, assigns up to ten risk grades, reports to all three credit bureaus, and has raised well over $100 million from investors including Third Prime, Valar Ventures and Global Founders Capital.
Daniel Simon
Daniel Simon is the founder and CEO of Coast, a New York fintech rebuilding the way commercial fleets pay for fuel, maintenance, and everything else that keeps work trucks moving. A software engineer turned Yale-trained lawyer, he co-founded the consumer lender Bread (sold for over $500M in 2020) before turning his attention to plumbers, HVAC installers, and landscapers - the 'real-world' businesses he felt a decade of fintech had ignored. Coast has raised more than $200M from ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Insight Partners, and Synchrony, and runs on Visa rails with an SMS-based driver authentication system that works on flip phones.