payments-infrastructure
(7)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.