Talal Naseem Janjua is a growth and product operator working at the seam where payments, analytics, and behavior meet. He is Head of Growth at Ace Money Transfer, a UK-regulated remittance company, after building growth and product functions at two of Pakistan's biggest digital-finance players, JazzCash and Zindigi. His specialty is turning channel planning, advanced analytics, and automation into measurable movement in the numbers that matter.
Lithic is a New York-based fintech that gives developers programmable card issuing and money-movement infrastructure. Born out of consumer brand Privacy.com, the company builds the API rails that let other companies create, manage and process virtual and physical payment cards with minimal code. Today it powers debit, credit and prepaid card programs for fintechs like Mercury and Coinstar, processing more than $1 billion in annual volume.
Sahil Hasan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dots, a developer-friendly global payouts platform that has processed over $1 billion to more than 1 million gig workers, creators, and contractors in 190+ countries. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a CMU master's degree, Sahil spent time as a Research Engineer at Google X before co-founding Dots through Y Combinator's S21 batch. The company raised an $8.9M Series A in February 2026 led by DCM Ventures, is profitable, and growing revenue 400% year-over-year.
Salomon Serfati is the co-founder and CEO of Chariot, the New York fintech building payment rails for the $326 billion donor-advised fund market. Its flagship product, DAFpay, turned the clunky multi-step process of donating from a DAF into a three-click checkout button now live on over 100,000 nonprofit donation forms, from the American Cancer Society to GoFundMe, and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and former BlackRock engineer who opened a separate 10%-of-income charity account with his first paycheck, Serfati turned a personal tithing habit into financial infrastructure for giving.
Shanthi Shanmugam is the co-founder and CEO of Casap, a New York fintech that uses AI to automate payment disputes, chargebacks, and first-party fraud detection for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate, she cut her teeth as a product manager at Facebook and spent roughly five years at Robinhood, where she launched the first crypto trading feature and later ran customer-care products. Watching back-office breakdowns erode consumer trust convinced her the dispute process was broken, so she reconnected with a former Facebook colleague, Saisi Peter, and started Casap in 2023. In August 2025 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to $33.5M.
Victor Lopez is the co-founder and CEO of FlexPoint, a payments-automation platform built for managed service providers and the small businesses they serve. A former finance lawyer turned private-credit principal at Owl Rock/Blue Owl Capital, he left the world of middle-market lending to attack a less glamorous problem: getting small businesses paid faster. Founded in 2022 and launched in 2023, FlexPoint raised a $12M Series A led by Foundry Group in 2025 and now handles payments for tens of thousands of businesses.
Yoyo Chang is the Taiwan-born British founder and CEO of Kody, a payments and physical-commerce platform he started as a high-school cafeteria project to kill lunch queues. A self-taught teenage stock trader who ploughed his own trading profits into the company, he raised the business through a $20M Series A in 2024 and pushed its annualised processing volume toward $1 billion, all before turning 25.
Bo Jiang is the co-founder and CEO of Lithic, the New York card-issuing platform that started life as the consumer privacy tool Privacy.com. He and two childhood friends built the burn-after-use virtual card people loved, then discovered the real prize was the issuer-processor plumbing underneath it. When developers started reverse-engineering Privacy.com's API to issue their own cards, Jiang turned the back end into the product, rebranded to Lithic, and now sells programmable money movement to high-growth companies.
Christine de Wendel is the co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, the QR-code checkout company that shrinks the worst part of dinner - waiting for the bill - from roughly fifteen minutes to about ten seconds. She spent two decades scaling European e-commerce unicorns Zalando and ManoMano out of Paris before founding sunday at age 40 with Big Mamma restaurateurs Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, then moved home to Atlanta to plant the company's U.S. flag. A Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate who once wanted to run the United Nations, she now runs a hospitality-payments business that has processed billions in restaurant transactions.
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.
Lawrence Herman is the Chief Financial Officer and AI Strategy Leader at Cents, the all-in-one operating system for laundromats and dry cleaners. A payments and fintech finance veteran, he has steered the books at Dwolla, Accrete, and Paxful, and logged earlier stretches at Mastercard, American Express, Dataminr, EY, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Harvard-trained in economics, he is known for calm during industry cycles, a preacher's zeal for financial literacy, and a habit of walking into every meeting with three discussion points and three asks.
Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Tony Tran is the co-founder and CEO of Lumanu, the payments and financing company building the financial infrastructure of the creator economy. A Vietnamese refugee who grew up in South Carolina, he studied computer science at MIT, advised at McKinsey, and built product at Google before starting Lumanu in 2017 after watching his mother discover YouTube creators on an iPad. Lumanu now moves money for thousands of creators and brands - from Jessica Alba and Snoop Dogg to DoorDash, Pepsi, and Sony - and made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies.
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Billtrust is a cloud-based fintech that automates the entire order-to-cash and invoice-to-cash cycle for B2B businesses - credit decisioning, online ordering, invoice delivery, payments, cash application, and collections. Founded in 2001 by Flint Lane, it went public via SPAC in 2021 (Nasdaq: BTRS) and was taken private by EQT in late 2022 for about $1.7 billion. Its Business Payments Network connects buyers, suppliers, and banks to move trillions in B2B payments with far less manual work.
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that lets businesses accept, process, and disburse money across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the wider region through a single API. Founded in 2015 and the first Indonesian company backed by Y Combinator, it handles virtual accounts, e-wallets, cards, QR codes, payouts, and fraud prevention for startups, marketplaces, and global enterprises expanding into the region.
Michael Walsh ran CyberSource for the decade that turned a quiet payment gateway into a $2 billion mouthful for Visa. He joined in 1998, took North American sales in 2000, ran global sales by 2004, became CEO in January 2010, and closed the Visa deal months later. He had already engineered the $660 million scoop of Authorize.Net in 2007. Now an advisor and board director, he is the kind of operator who reads quietly and signs loudly.
Moses Lo is the co-founder and CEO of Xendit, the Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that became Indonesia's first Y Combinator unicorn. He runs it from San Francisco and Jakarta, and built it after pivoting away from a bitcoin remittance idea six weeks into YC.
Baton Systems is a post-trade infrastructure company that uses a shared permissioned ledger to give banks real-time control over collateral, payments and FX settlement. Its Core platform connects to legacy systems without ripping them out, and is already used by some of the largest banks in the world to move trillions of dollars with bank-grade safety in minutes instead of days.
Bolt is a San Francisco fintech building a one-click checkout network for online retailers. It connects merchants and shoppers through a single, cross-site identity, layering payments, fraud prevention, and AI-personalized flows on top. After a turbulent stretch following its 2022 peak, Bolt has been rebuilding through partnerships with Palantir, Klarna, Affirm, and Checkout.com, and a return of founder Ryan Breslow to the CEO seat.
Clover builds cloud-based point-of-sale systems and payment processing for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Sunnyvale in 2010 and acquired by First Data in 2012 (now part of Fiserv), Clover bundles Android-powered hardware with a software platform for restaurants, retail, and personal services - processing well over $300B in annualized card volume.
Cybersource is a global payment management platform owned by Visa, helping merchants accept, secure, and optimize digital transactions in 190+ countries. Founded in 1994 and acquired by Visa in 2010 for ~$2B, it powers payment gateway, tokenization, fraud management (Decision Manager) and orchestration services for hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide.
Finix is a San Francisco-based payments infrastructure company that gives software platforms, marketplaces, and retailers the tools to own their payments end-to-end. Built around a no-code/low-code PayFac-as-a-Service model and a developer-friendly API, Finix lets SaaS companies monetize payments, manage merchants, and route money across cards, ACH, and wallets without becoming a registered payment facilitator themselves.
HoneyBook is an AI-powered business management platform built for independent service professionals - photographers, event planners, consultants, and creative freelancers. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco with roots in Tel Aviv, the platform combines CRM, contracts, invoicing, payments, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single clientflow hub. With $498M in total funding, a $2.4B valuation, $140M ARR, and more than $12 billion in payments processed, HoneyBook has become the dominant platform for the growing independent economy - helping over 100,000 small business owners run client relationships from first inquiry to final payment without switching between a dozen tools.
Adi Goel is co-founder and COO of Sardine, an AI-powered fraud and compliance platform that has screened over $1.36 trillion in payments for 300+ enterprise customers across 70+ countries. Before Sardine, he scaled Revolut's entire US business from zero to millions of customers and led product strategy at Deutsche Börse managing a $200M fintech fund. A Wharton MBA and IIT Delhi engineer, Goel brings rare cross-disciplinary range across quantitative finance, product, and operations to building fintech infrastructure.
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.
Arjun Jayaram is the Founder and CEO of Baton Systems, a San Francisco-based fintech company rebuilding post-trade infrastructure for the world's largest financial institutions. A serial technologist who previously co-founded Compass Labs (acquired by Yahoo) and held roles at Twitter and Dwolla, Jayaram identified a stubborn problem in the financial plumbing - that moving digital assets across different ledgers was the real bottleneck, not the digitization of assets themselves. Under his leadership, Baton's platform now processes nearly $30 billion in daily transaction value for seven of the nine largest western banks, enabling real-time settlement and intraday liquidity management without requiring institutions to replace their core systems.
Robert 'Bob' Donahue is a veteran technology and fintech executive who led Authorize.Net Holdings as President and CEO from 2004 to 2007, steering the company through its landmark $565 million acquisition by CyberSource Corporation - one of the defining deals in digital payments history. After joining CyberSource's board post-acquisition, he went on to serve as an independent director at NETSCOUT Systems and Sycamore Networks. With a career spanning senior executive roles at Manufacturers Services Ltd., Stratus Computer, and Celestica, Donahue has been a consistent presence at the intersection of technology infrastructure and financial services for over two decades.
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Hadi Solh is the Co-Founder of Flex, an AI-native finance super app for mid-market business owners, and Managing Partner at Atmos Ventures, a deep-technology venture capital firm. Drawing on 20+ years across Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Credit Suisse, he co-built Flex from a construction-industry credit card into a $490M+ funded platform processing $3B+ in annualized payments, serving business owners who power 40% of US payroll. Based in Dubai, he also sits on the boards of Oxford Ionics (quantum computing) and Nethone (cybersecurity).