payments-infrastructure
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Brad Goodall Spent Eight Years Making the Card Optional
An Australian founder went to London, learned the plumbing of modern finance, and built a checkout alternative with banks instead of against them. After Banked’s acquisition by NAB, his most useful lesson is less about the exit than the patience required to change how money moves.
One is where the money lives, one is how it moves
Mercury is the bank account a startup opens; Modern Treasury is the software layer that pushes payments across it and every other account a company holds. Two of fintech's quiet giants, solving opposite halves of the same problem.
The Bank You Use Without Knowing Its Name
Cross River sits behind some of fintech's most familiar names, turning bank accounts, loans, cards and real-time payments into software building blocks. Its wager is that the most valuable bank of the internet age may be the one customers rarely see.
Miden
Miden is a Nigerian fintech building payments infrastructure for businesses across Sub-Saharan Africa. Through a single API, companies can issue virtual and physical cards in USD, NGN and multi-currency formats, run banking-as-a-service programs, open business accounts, and handle bill payments - the plumbing that lets other companies launch financial products without building banking rails from scratch. Founded in 2022 and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Miden has issued over a million cards and processes billions in transaction volume.
The New Money Company
The New Money Company (YC W24) is a San Francisco fintech that protects B2B invoices against nonpayment and moves the money across borders. Its product, Numo, underwrites a buyer's creditworthiness instantly, guarantees the seller gets paid even if the buyer defaults, and settles funds to more than 80 destinations - with an early focus on getting international contractors in emerging markets paid in USD within seconds. Founded in 2023 by three former Hologram operators, it aims to let businesses sell into new markets without carrying the risk of a buyer who never pays.
Tomás Campos
Tomás Campos is the co-founder and CEO of Spinwheel, an Oakland-based fintech building agentic AI-powered credit data and payments infrastructure for the consumer debt market. A UC Berkeley and Haas School of Business graduate, he spent two decades in payments and commerce - growing Blackhawk Network's digital payments division into a $1.5 billion business and co-founding the conversational commerce startup FluidM, which was acquired by Westfield. He launched Spinwheel in 2019 after the consumer debt crisis touched his own family, aiming to make the fragmented world of loans and liabilities as accessible as open banking made bank accounts. In June 2025 the company raised a $30 million Series A led by F-Prime Capital.
GrailPay
GrailPay is a New York-based fintech building the risk and intelligence layer for bank payments. Its API-driven platform scores transactions, verifies bank accounts and identities, and moves money via ACH and instant rails - helping fintechs, processors, lenders and software companies reduce failed payments and fraud. Founded in 2021 by Will Messina and Lee Jones, the company positions itself as a trust layer for B2B commerce as instant settlement, stablecoins and agentic payments reshape how money moves.
Yuzu Health
Yuzu Health is a New York-based healthtech company that rebuilds the administrative backbone of health insurance into a single, white-labeled system of record. Operating as a vertically integrated third-party administrator (TPA), Yuzu runs the behind-the-scenes engine for claims processing, payments, and member administration, letting insurers, brokers, and self-funded employers launch highly configurable plan designs - direct provider contracts, cash-pay options, and dynamic copays - without the heavy services burden of legacy administrators. Founded in 2022, the company works with customers across all 50 states and has processed more than $1 billion in claims payment volume.
Ansa
Ansa is a San Francisco fintech that builds API-first, white-labeled stored-value wallet infrastructure for merchants. It lets brands launch their own branded digital wallet - the Starbucks-app model - where customers pre-load funds and pay in-app, online, or in-store. By batching many small purchases into one funded balance, Ansa cuts card processing fees on low-ticket transactions while adding incentives, loyalty, and analytics on top. Founded in 2022 by Adyen and Affirm alumni Sophia Goldberg and JT Cho, Ansa raised a $14M Series A in April 2024 (about 95% of it from female investors), bringing total funding to roughly $19.4M.
Basis Theory
Basis Theory is a payments infrastructure company that gives merchants a cloud-native, PCI Level 1-compliant vault to tokenize, route, and control sensitive payment data across any payment service provider - without vendor lock-in. Founded in 2020 by fintech veterans from Dwolla, Yodlee, and Klarna, the company has raised roughly $50 million and now positions its vault as the foundation for AI-driven, agentic commerce.
Forage
Forage is a San Francisco payments company that makes it easy for retailers and online platforms to accept government benefits like SNAP EBT, WIC, and HSA/FSA. It is one of only a handful of third-party processors approved by the USDA to handle online EBT, pairing a unified merchant API with hands-on certification support. On the consumer side, its Forage app helps low-income families check their EBT balance, find discounts, and earn rewards. The technology runs at more than 100,000 stores across all 50 states, including Dollar General, Save A Lot, Gopuff, DoorDash, and Uber Eats.
Natural
Natural is a San Francisco fintech building payment infrastructure for AI agents. Its platform - wallets, payments, ledgering, routing, identity, and compliance - lets autonomous agents initiate, authorize, and execute money movement on behalf of businesses and consumers. Founded in August 2025 by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, the company came out of stealth with a $9.8M seed round and followed with a $30M Series A at a reported $150M valuation.
Will Messina
Will Messina is the co-founder and CEO of GrailPay, a New York-based fintech building the risk and intelligence layer for bank payments. He started the company as a broke college kid at Boston College who wanted people to pay straight from their bank accounts, then pivoted from a consumer idea into the unglamorous plumbing of ACH: fraud detection, account verification, and settlement certainty. In June 2026 GrailPay raised a $10.5M Series A led by MissionOG to scale its Payments Identity Network, which covers over 99% of US bank accounts and aims to become the trust layer for instant and agentic B2B payments.
Sam O'Keefe
Sam O'Keefe is the co-founder and CEO of Flex, the San Francisco fintech often called 'Stripe for HSA/FSA payments.' Flex lets health and wellness brands accept the roughly $150 billion of tax-advantaged health-account money that Americans leave sitting unused every year, turning a confusing benefits process into a one-tap checkout. A two-time Y Combinator founder who previously built fraud and risk software at Unit21 and led startup programs at Google, O'Keefe raised a $15M Series A in September 2025 to make 'pay with HSA/FSA' as ordinary at checkout as PayPal.
Astra
Astra is a San Francisco-based fintech that gives developers a single API to move money instantly between bank accounts and debit cards. Built on rails like Visa Direct, RTP, FedNow and ACH, its platform lets fintechs, banks and enterprises embed instant disbursements, account funding and accelerated transfers without building their own payments stack - going live in about 30 days instead of six months. Founded in 2016 by Gil Akos, Sam Morgan and Zach Nolan, Astra has processed more than $1 billion in lifetime payments and is backed by FPV Ventures, Nyca Partners and others.
Halliday
Halliday is a San Francisco blockchain infrastructure company building the Agentic Workflow Protocol, a system that lets developers create onchain financial applications without writing smart contracts. Its flagship product, Halliday Payments, gives developers a single interface for fiat onramps, cross-chain bridging, swaps, and offramps. Backed by a16z crypto across both its seed and Series A rounds, Halliday has raised $26 million total and works with teams including DeFi Kingdoms, Avalanche, ApeCoin, Story Protocol, and Metis.
Matthew Fox
Matthew Fox is the CEO of OpenNode, a Bitcoin payments infrastructure company that lets businesses in 126 countries accept Bitcoin and send payouts over the Lightning Network with a few lines of code. A Dartmouth graduate who began his career in investment banking at Jefferies and later founded NGU Ventures, Fox took the helm of OpenNode in October 2022, months after the company closed a $20M Series A at a $220M valuation backed by Twitter, Tim Draper, Kingsway, and a Fidelity-affiliated fund.
Triumph
Triumph (Triumph Labs) is a San Francisco company that turns ordinary mobile games into real-money skill tournaments. Its plug-and-play SDK lets developers add cash competitions with a single line of code, while Triumph handles the hard parts behind the scenes: payments, KYC identity checks, state-by-state legal compliance, geolocation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, and payouts. Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Jake Brooks and Jared Geller, the company raised $14.1M (a $10.2M Series A led by General Catalyst plus a $3.9M seed) and also runs its own consumer apps - Triumph Arcade for skill games and Rips for card collectibles.
Bo Jiang
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.
Jareau Wadé
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.
Nium
Nium is a San Francisco- and Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company that lets banks, fintechs, and businesses move money across more than 220 markets via a single API. It runs one of the largest real-time payout networks in the world, supporting payouts in 100+ currencies and instant settlement in 100+ markets.