small-business-finance
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CashDirector puts an accountant inside your bank
The Polish fintech gives small businesses bookkeeping, cash-flow tools and a human accountant through the bank they already use. Its quiet advantage is distribution: someone else already has the customers.
Brad Rosenfeld Is Making the Complicated Parts of Finance Easier to Act On
His career has moved through affinity marketing, payments, digital identity and private-market software. Now back at Biz2X, Brad Rosenfeld is applying the same practical idea to AI-powered lending: technology matters when people can understand it, trust it and use it.
Joseph Thalinjan Is Rewriting the Most Stubborn Date in Business: The First
The former McKinsey consultant found a calendar problem hiding inside commercial real estate. With RentFlow, he is building a payment layer for businesses whose revenue refuses to arrive on schedule.
Okky Pratama Reads the Numbers Everyone Else Avoids
The Delegasi co-founder turned an unfashionable hobby - reading financial statements - into a practical bet on Indonesia's small businesses. His path from Malang to ITB, MIT and Y Combinator is really a story about choosing useful problems.
Adam Stettner Bet His Second Act on Cannabis’s Missing Clock
After decades in conventional lending, Adam Stettner walked into an industry conventional lenders avoided. His wager is that useful capital does more than arrive - it keeps time with the business using it.
Casca Tried to Automate the Whole Bank. Then One Customer Showed It the $1 Trillion Wedge.
The Stanford founders began with AI agents for everything a bank might do. A failed platform deal and one unusually candid customer pushed them toward the unglamorous bottleneck that mattered: getting small-business loans out of inboxes and into underwriting.
Relay vs Found Is Really About Who Touches the Money
Relay organizes access when several people manage several businesses. Found organizes the tax math when one owner is doing nearly everything.
The Accountant Who Decided Bookkeeping Should Feel Like Software
Matt Gardner shut down a traditional CPA practice to rebuild it as Hiline - one team, one bill, and technology that keeps small-business numbers current instead of three weeks late.
The Bank That Stayed Put While Money Went Everywhere Else
For 125 years, Davis Trust has made a business of knowing one corner of West Virginia unusually well. Its edge is not scale - it is the judgment that comes from staying close.
Flow48
Flow48 is a Dubai-based fintech that gives small and medium businesses in emerging markets fast access to working capital by turning their future revenue and unpaid invoices into upfront cash. Founded in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Idriss Al Rifai, the company uses a proprietary, data-driven underwriting engine to approve non-dilutive, collateral-free financing of up to $20 million, typically disbursing funds within 24 to 48 hours. Operating across the UAE and South Africa with expansion into Saudi Arabia, Flow48 raised a $69 million Series A in February 2025 to close the SME funding gap that traditional banks leave open.
Jessica Chen Riolfi
Jessica Chen Riolfi is the co-founder and CEO of Uprise, a fintech building embedded tax and financial advisory for small business owners. She spent more than a decade shipping products at Wise, Earnin and Robinhood, ran TransferWise's Asia business across 15 countries, and started out in J.P. Morgan investment banking before pairing human advisors with AI to make real financial advice affordable for entrepreneurs.
Jerry Connelly
Jerry Connelly is the Chief Executive Officer of KeepingCount, a remote-first outsourced accounting and advisory firm that gives growing small businesses and nonprofits the bookkeeping, reporting, and fractional-CFO horsepower they usually cannot afford to hire in-house. Built around the promise of 'better numbers for growing businesses,' KeepingCount pairs platform technologies like Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Online with hands-on accounting teams serving construction, consumer products, professional services, real estate, life sciences, and vacation-rental clients. Originally headquartered in Boise, Idaho, the company now runs as a distributed organization, and Connelly leads it with a stated emphasis on values - conscientious, disciplined, gracious, integrity, and serving all clients.