Cristina Vila Vives is the founder and CEO of Cledara, a SaaS spend-management platform that gives companies visibility and control over their software subscriptions. After more than a decade running operations teams in the financial industry, she launched Cledara in 2018 to solve a problem she kept seeing firsthand: companies losing money and time to a sprawling, unmanaged stack of software. Cledara now serves over a thousand customers across Europe and the United States, and Forbes has named her among the business leaders changing the world.
Malte Rau is the Berlin-based CEO and co-founder of Pliant, a B2B fintech that lets companies and banks issue physical and virtual credit cards and plug the resulting data straight into their finance stacks. A former risk manager and fintech investor, he founded Pliant in February 2020 with Fabian Terner and has grown it into a modular, API-first card-issuing platform serving thousands of European businesses. In April 2025 the company closed a $40 million Series B led by Illuminate Financial and Speedinvest to fund its expansion into the United States.
Dean M. Leavitt is the founder and CEO of Boost Payment Solutions, a New York fintech he launched in 2009 to build commercial card and B2B payment rails for large enterprises. A 30-plus-year payments veteran who previously ran public and bankruptcy-rescued processing companies, he spotted a vacuum in the roughly $125 trillion global B2B market and built patented straight-through processing technology now used across 45-plus countries by more than half the Fortune 100. Boost has landed on the Inc. 5000 five times and raised a $22 million Series C led by Invictus Growth Partners in 2021.
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.