Sean Neville is the cofounder and CEO of Catena Labs, a Boston startup building what it calls the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution - a bank designed for autonomous AI agents to hold accounts, spend, get paid, and settle in stablecoins. He previously cofounded Circle in 2013 with Jeremy Allaire and served as its president and co-CEO, where he was the architect behind USDC. Catena raised an $18 million seed in May 2025 (led by a16z crypto) and a $30 million Series A in May 2026 (led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto), and is applying for a national trust bank charter with the OCC.
Lamine Zarrad is the founder and CEO of StellarFi, an Austin-based fintech that reports everyday bill payments to the three major credit bureaus so Americans with thin or no credit files can build a score without taking on debt. A refugee from Soviet-era Azerbaijan who sold pirated VHS tapes in a Moscow chemical lab as a teenager, he went on to serve in the Marine Corps, work as a National Bank Examiner at the OCC, and build three fintech startups in a decade. StellarFi raised a $15M Series A in March 2023 led by Acrew Capital, and its members average a 26-point credit-score jump in their first month.
Jason Mikula is the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, an independent newsletter that reaches more than 90,000 subscribers with critical, no-favors analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto. After more than a decade scaling consumer lending businesses at Enova, LendUp, and Goldman Sachs, he became one of the most-cited independent voices on Banking-as-a-Service and fintech regulation, writing the award-winning book on BaaS and co-hosting the Fintech Business Podcast. He works from outside Amsterdam, covering the U.S. fintech-banking ecosystem from across an ocean.