payments-infrastructure
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Raj Kamal and the last mile of money
From India’s civil service to fintech investing, Raj Kamal has spent his career inside institutions. At TransFi, he is working on the gap between money moving across a border and money arriving ready to use.
Will Messina Went Looking for Debit-Card Rewards. He Found a $93 Trillion Trust Problem.
A broke college student wondered why debit cards earned no points. The detour that followed led him beneath checkout, into the slow machinery of ACH, and toward a harder question: can a bank payment be trusted before it moves?
Ofek Lavian Found a Fortune in the Checkout Lane Everyone Else Avoided
He learned payments at Uber and Instacart, then chose the corner of fintech buried under federal rules and grocery receipts. Forage is his wager that dignity can be infrastructure.
Kahlil Lalji Is Teaching AI Agents How to Pay Their Own Way
Before machines can do business, they need a way to hold and move money. Kahlil Lalji has spent a decade taking an unusually scenic route to that problem - from esports edits and Columbia Records to couples banking, marathon splits and Natural's agentic payment rails.
Dom Okiemute Is Selling African Fintech Something Priceless: Less Anxiety
After a decade inside banking and fintech, the Miden CEO has reduced his product philosophy to one Nigerian business truth: reliable money movement is peace of mind.
Juan Luis Pérez Escobar Is Connecting Latin America’s Payment Islands
A lawyer from Montería spent years learning how rules and businesses fit together. Now he is building the connective tissue that lets money move between banks, businesses, and borders in real time.
Juan Diego Galvez Is Building the Financial Plumbing Nobody Sees
Raised around banking but drawn to technology, the PayCaddy co-founder chose Panama as both headquarters and proving ground. His wager is simple: make the difficult machinery of cards, wallets and compliance feel almost ordinary.
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.
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.