Tagged: remittances
11 results
Pana
Pana is a Miami-based, Y Combinator-backed neobank building a stablecoin-native dollar account for Latinos and immigrants in the United States and their families across Latin America. It powers a closed-loop remittance network - borderless USD balances that move money instantly between users with zero fees, backed by USDC and settling to more than 5,000 banks across 27 countries. Founded in 2021 by Piero Nunez del Risco and Luis Pena, Pana pairs a consumer app (US checking-style accounts opened with a passport, a Mastercard debit card, direct deposit, and free peer transfers) with an emerging embedded-finance layer that lets banks and platforms serve the US diaspora.
Nicolás Jaramillo
Nicolás Jaramillo is a Chilean engineer turned serial fintech founder who wants to be the BlackRock of web3. After helping build MACH, Chile's first widely adopted digital bank, and scaling the cross-border payments company Global66 across Latin America, he co-founded Arch in 2020 to make crypto investing as boring and accessible as an index fund. Arch packages the chaos of DeFi into tokenized, risk-rated portfolios, raised $5M in seed funding from Digital Currency Group and Upload Ventures, and aims to bring traditional-market discipline to the decentralized economy.
Piero Risco
Piero Núñez Del Risco is the founder and CEO of Pana (YC S22), a cross-border neobank building borderless USD accounts and a zero-fee remittance network for the 62 million Latinos living in the United States. A Dominican operator who spent more than a decade inside Caribbean banking - including leading a 130-person team that rebuilt Scotiabank's digital platform for 2 million customers across 11 countries - he left the corner office to attack the 6% fee that immigrants pay to send money home. Pana lets people open a US bank account with just a passport, and has grown into a 'global bank on chain' blending fiat and stablecoins across 125 countries.
Simanta Gautam
Simanta Gautam is the co-founder and CEO of Alpen Labs, a startup building zero-knowledge infrastructure to make Bitcoin scalable, private, and programmable. An MIT-trained engineer who earlier founded the airport-security computer-vision company Synapse Technology (acquired by Palantir, where he became AI Lead), he now leads a team turning Bitcoin's intentionally limited base layer into rails for global money. The mission traces to a personal detail: founders with roots in Nepal, where roughly a quarter of GDP arrives as remittances, saw firsthand how much money is lost to middlemen.
Sara Drakeley
Sara Drakeley is the CEO of Sentz (formerly MobileCoin), a privacy-focused stablecoin and global payments company based in Sacramento, California. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist, she built animation pipelines at Walt Disney Animation Studios - the trees in Frozen, the water in Moana, the fur in Zootopia - then wrote trading infrastructure on Wall Street and joined SpaceX's simulation team before becoming the third engineering hire at MobileCoin in 2018. She rose from principal engineer to CTO to CEO, and now leads the company's push to make instant, low-cost, private cross-border payments accessible worldwide.
Sentz Global
Sentz (formerly MobileCoin) is a San Francisco-based fintech building a free, self-custodial mobile wallet that lets people send, save, receive and earn in stablecoins. Its dollar-pegged eUSD moves money across borders in seconds for a fraction of a cent, with end-to-end encryption and full user custody. Used in 180+ countries with deep traction in Nigeria, Sentz targets freelancers, remote workers and families sending remittances, and offers up to 8% yield through Sentz Earn.
Talal Naseem Janjua
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.
Común
Común is a New York-based digital bank built Spanish-first for immigrants in the United States. It offers an FDIC-insured checking account, a Visa debit card, low-cost cross-border remittances, Zelle access, and one of the largest cash-deposit networks in the country - all openable without a Social Security number. Founded in late 2021 by Mexican immigrants Andrés Santos and Abiel Gutiérrez, Común set out to fix the financial exclusion they experienced firsthand, and it has grown into one of the fastest-growing consumer fintechs serving the Latino community.
Andres Santos
Andres Santos is the co-founder and CEO of Comun, a Spanish-first digital bank built for Latino immigrants in the United States. A Mexican-born MIT Sloan MBA who once struggled to open a US bank account himself, Santos turned that friction into a fast-growing neobank that accepts more than 100 Latin American IDs, requires no Social Security Number, and sends remittances across Latin America. After a $4.5M seed round in late 2023, Comun raised a $21.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in August 2024 - just months later - on the back of 52% month-over-month customer growth.
Félix
Félix (Félix Pago) is a Miami-based fintech that lets Latin Americans in the U.S. send money home through a WhatsApp chat. Under the hood, it routes transfers over stablecoin rails (USDC) and uses AI to handle compliance and customer service in Spanish. Founded in 2020 by Manuel Godoy and Bernardo García, the company has moved more than $1 billion across nine LatAm corridors and raised a $75M Series B led by QED Investors in April 2025.
Manuel Godoy
Manuel Godoy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Félix, a WhatsApp-native remittance platform that uses USDC stablecoins and AI to let Latino immigrants send money home in minutes for a fraction of traditional costs. Born in Venezuela and educated at Caltech and Wharton, Godoy turned his own immigrant experience into a company that has processed over $1 billion in remittances, serves 400,000+ active users across nine countries, and raised $90.5M including a $75M Series B in April 2025 led by QED Investors.