payment-infrastructure
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Maxwell Obi Is Building the Financial Plumbing Behind Africa's Global Trade
After an exit, a tour through global remittances, and hundreds of conversations with traders and finance teams, Maxwell Obi chose a gloriously unglamorous problem: helping emerging-market businesses move money on time.
Don Pansacola Is Building the Boring Parts of Money - and the Strange Future of Work
The NextPay co-founder wrote the ledger, hid a few Easter eggs, and helped turn a pandemic pivot into Philippine payment infrastructure. Now he is testing whether an engineering team can share more than a codebase.
Daniel Lev Is Building the Payment Company His First Startup Needed
A fantasy-sports checkout problem sent Daniel Lev down a payments rabbit hole. The result is Coinflow, a Chicago company trying to make a merchant's money move as quickly as a customer's click.
Colin Luce Is Building the Vault for Commerce’s Agentic Turn
After years inside fintech’s expanding platforms, Colin Luce made a contrarian bet: the most valuable layer in payments may be the neutral vault underneath them. Now Basis Theory is testing whether merchant-controlled data can keep commerce open when software starts shopping for us.
Paul Gormley
Paul Gormley is the EVP and Chief Operating Officer of PayNearMe, the Silicon Valley payments company that helps businesses in lending, iGaming, and consumer finance collect payments across cash, cards, ACH, and mobile wallets. He joined in 2023 as SVP of Operations and stepped into the COO seat, bringing a resume that runs from partner at McKinsey & Company to a long run at Google leading Commerce and Payments Partnerships and finance for the Infrastructure and AI/ML groups. He holds a BA from Northwestern and an MBA from Harvard, and is known around the office for long, slow bike rides in the hills above Silicon Valley.
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.
Maggie Wu
Maggie Wu is the CEO and co-founder of VelaFi, a stablecoin-powered payments infrastructure company that helps businesses move money across borders faster and cheaper than traditional banking rails. Born in China and now based in Frisco, Texas, she built her name in Latin America, where her earlier venture TruBit grew to more than 300,000 users. In January 2026 VelaFi raised a $20 million Series B led by XVC and Ikuyo, with backing from Alibaba Investment and BAI Capital, pushing total funding past $40 million as the company expands from Latin America into the United States and Asia.
Malte Rau
Malte Rau is the Berlin-based CEO and co-founder of Pliant, a B2B fintech that lets companies and banks issue physical and virtual credit cards and plug the resulting data straight into their finance stacks. A former risk manager and fintech investor, he founded Pliant in February 2020 with Fabian Terner and has grown it into a modular, API-first card-issuing platform serving thousands of European businesses. In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest to fund its expansion into the United States.
Nahuel Candia
Nahuel Candia is the co-founder and CEO of Rebill, a payments-infrastructure company that lets global businesses process payments, payouts and financial operations across Latin America and the US without setting up local entities. A developer since age 14 who built three companies before 30, he took Rebill through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and raised roughly $3.6-3.7M from Tiger Global, SV Angel, SOMA Capital, Magma Partners and founders like Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and Dropbox's Arash Ferdowsi. He says Rebill was rejected by YC dozens of times before getting in, and that persistence is now part of the company's origin story.
Arnold Lee
Arnold Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere Labs, the software company behind SpherePay, a cross-border stablecoin payments API, and SphereNet, a Solana-virtual-machine settlement ledger built for regulated fintechs. A Columbia computer science grad who first stumbled into Bitcoin in 2009 trying to buy video games, he spent his early career in embedded systems for IoT startups before incorporating Sphere a week after the FTX collapse, off the back of a global Stripe hackathon win and a stint in Jump Crypto's incubator. Sphere now moves billions in annual volume through corridors legacy banking forgot - Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East - on the thesis that every payments company eventually becomes a compliance company.
Alex Fine
Alex Fine is the founder and CEO of Fun (fun.xyz), a crypto-fiat payments company that builds the deposit and withdrawal rails behind apps like Polymarket, Lighter, and Aave. Fun processes over $18 billion in annual payment volume and raised a $72 million Series A in early 2026 led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire. A Stanford math and computer-science dropout who shipped his first acquired app at 16, Fine wants Fun to be 'the front door' for a tokenized economy where anyone can buy anything with anything.
Ankit Kumar
Ankit Kumar is a software engineer and technical leader at Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based fintech building payment operations infrastructure for companies moving money at scale. With a Master's in Computer Science from Syracuse University, he built the foundations of Modern Treasury's full-stack Payments product - an integrated payment service provider (PSP) handling fiat and stablecoin payments across ACH, RTP, FedNow, and wire rails. Before payments, his career ranged from AR helmet prototypes for BMW's CES 2016 showcase to Android apps that earned the title 'The Ultimate Camera App' from the tech press.
Marshall Jones
Marshall Jones is the CTO and Co-Founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based fintech company that has become the world's leader in payment tokenization with over 5 billion tokens stored. He co-founded VGS in 2015 alongside Mahmoud Abdelkader after building PCI-compliant payment vaults at Balanced Payments (later acquired by Stripe). Under his technical leadership, VGS has raised over $104 million in funding from top investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Vertex Ventures, serving Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks globally.
Richie Serna
Richie Serna is the CEO and co-founder of Finix, a full-stack payments infrastructure company he built from the ground up in San Francisco. A Harvard-educated son of Mexican immigrant parents from Santa Ana, California, Serna left management consulting at Booz & Company, taught himself to code, and joined Balanced - the first payments API for marketplaces - before founding Finix in 2015. Today, Finix has raised $205.5M in total funding (including a $75M Series C in October 2024) and has become a direct-connection payment processor competing with Stripe, Adyen, and Braintree, serving software platforms and marketplaces processing billions of dollars annually.
Matt Marcus
Matt Marcus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, the San Francisco-based payment operations platform that processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for companies like Gusto, Navan, and Procore. A Dartmouth computer science grad and former competitive rower, Marcus spent a year at LendingHome building the payment system that processed over $3 billion in mortgage loans - and that experience became the blueprint for Modern Treasury. He co-founded the company in 2018 with Sam Aarons and Dimitri Dadiomov, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, and has raised $183M in total funding. In July 2025, he transitioned from CPO to CEO, steering Modern Treasury toward unified fiat and stablecoin payment rails following the acquisition of Beam.