Fintech Silicon Valley

Jon Soberg is Managing Partner at MS&AD Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on the future of finance, risk assessment, and building a sustainable society. Jon has made over 120 investments across 5 continents and has held more than 40 board positions. Prior to becoming an investor, Jon was a serial entrepreneur and operator, with an IPO exit at Adforce. Jon has a Master's degree in Engineering, a CFA, and is an MBA and Palmer Scholar at Wharton. Jon is ranked #13 on Business Insider's Seed 100 list of top seed investors.

Akshay Krishnaiah Founder & CEO of fast growing subscription-based Cash Now Pay Later startup Line (useline.com) Akshay is a millennial, immigrant, uber driver (36,000 miles SF Bay Area) turned Techstars fintech startup founder & CEO at Line (useline.com) that came out of stealth this July and has taken the world by storm by delivering over $500,000 in Lines at $30 a line in just the last 90 days, to people who earn as low as $600 a month helping them make ends meet while proving to the world that you can do social good and run a profitable business by posting an impressive 11X  jump in monthly recurring revenue. He was previously Global Product Head at PayPal's research labs where he earned over 75 patent publications covering hardware, payments, embedded fintech and consumer fintech and prior to that he headed the highly coveted PayPal-eBay Retail Labs where he and his team invented Wallet Tokenization the foundational technology behind most of PayPal and Venmo's recent breakthroughs along with

Nadim is the son of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with virtually nothing. The passion to help people build financial resilience and independence was instilled in him through his upbringing. This, and the values learned from his family, led Nadim—along with his co-founder Matthew Cooper—to start EarnUp Inc. in 2013 with a goal of helping the over 200 million Americans in debt get out of it faster. Now EarnUp has grown into a company that brings lenders, financial institutions, nonprofits, and consumers together to identify core issues and to create solutions that work. Prior to EarnUp, he worked at Serent Capital, a $600M private equity firm, focused on tech-enabled services; led investments with NCB Capital, a $12B asset manager; and worked at McKinsey & Company consulting large banks. He also practiced IP and technology law at Kirkland & Ellis. Nadim holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and graduated with highest honors from Rutgers University.

Chris Hsu is the CEO & Co-Founder of Azibo, a VC-backed real estate fintech startup focused on simplifying the rental property experience. Prior to Azibo, Chris served as an Advisory Partner at a16z and previously was CEO of Micro Focus, a $4B enterprise software company. He also was COO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he successfully led the largest corporate separation in history. Chris spent the earlier part of his career in leadership roles at top consulting firms, including KKR and McKinsey. A military veteran, Chris graduated as a Distinguished Cadet from the United States Military Academy at West Point and completed his U.S. Army tenure as a Captain. He also has an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. SPONSORED VIA TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Lauren is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Acrew Capital where she invests in fintech. Among her investments, Lauren led the 2016 Series A round in Chime. Other investments include Divvy, Finix, Gusto, Kettle, La Haus, Papaya Payments, and Pie Insurance. Previously, Lauren worked in product marketing at Google leading a number of launches for GSuite, including Google Drive. Lauren began her career building tech partnerships for the Clinton Foundation in India. Lauren is a Trustee Emerita at Brown University where she served as the university’s youngest board member.  Lauren was featured on the 2021 Forbes Midas Brink List. SPONSORED VIA TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Toshi Kameoka manages Airwallex’s U.S. and Canada business and administrative operations as Head of Strategy, North America. Based in San Francisco, he was Airwallex's first permanent U.S. employee and has been responsible for Airwallex's U.S. money transmitter licensing (MTL) and financial partnership strategy in the region. Toshi has more than 15 years of experience in business strategy, corporate development, and partnerships across various sectors, including payments and fintech, commerce tech, and mobile data and analytics. SPONSORED VIA TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Ram leads the Digital Asset business at Cross River. Ram is the founder of PeerIQ – the leading risk analytics firm for FinTech lending.  Prior to founding PeerIQ, Ram was an investor in structured products and an SVP at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch where he was a leader on the Cards & Deposits executive management team. Previously, Ram served as a management consultant working with C-leaders at Fortune 50 consumer finance companies. Ram received a B.A. in Economics-Philosophy from Columbia University and is a CFA charterholder

Raghu is the Co-founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the largest and fastest growing digital asset brokerages. He's an engineer by background and passionate about building products that create value – leading him to become a serial entrepreneur,product leader, active investor, andboard advisor to several Silicon Valley startups. Prior to FalconX, Raghu held product leadership roles in Google. He was on Sundar Pichai’s ChromeOS team and led efforts to scale Chromebooks to over $3 billion revenue for Google and its partners. He started his career atMotorola as an engineer in a team that pioneered high definition video transmission over IPstack, laying the technical foundation for many popular video streaming services such as Netflix and Youtube. Raghu holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School,M.S. from University of Texas at Dallasspecializing in Signal Processing & Machine Learning,and B.Tech. from Vellore Institute of Technology. SPONSORED VIA TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Ken is a FinTech and Payments pioneer, who holds the distinction of being the first person to send $1 around the world by mobile transfer. In his career, Ken has launched: the first mobile remittances service in the US, the first global mobile bank account, the first neobank for immigrants in the US, and the first decoupled business payments smart switch.  Currently, Ken leads SnapCheck in revolutionizing business-to-business payments: eliminating $50 Billion in costs, removing $20 Billion in fraud. Previously, as co-founder and CEO of m-Via, Ken grew the company into an industry-recognized leader in mobile financial services and brought the company to cash-flow positive before leading m-Via through an acquisition by Boom Financial. Ken is a Founding Member of the Faster Payments Council, as well as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Business Payments Coalition and the FedNow Community.  Ken has been named a Top Innovator to Watch by Bank Innovation, a Top FinTech Innovator by Aspioneer, a Top 25 Fin

Alexandre Lazarow is a global venture capitalist and the author of Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs - from Delhi to Detroit - Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon Valley (Harvard Business Review Press). He has invested in startups including Chime, Kin, Neon, Sidecar Health, Facily, FinAccel, ZenBusiness, Kueski, Guiabolso, Zola, Rensource, Terminal, among others. He is a Partner with Cathay Innovation, a Paris-based firm that invests across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Alex is also an adjunct professor specializing in social impact investment and entrepreneurship at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. SPONSORED BY TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Mark Straub is the Co-founder and CEO of Smile Identity, the leading digital KYC and identity verification provider in Africa. He has spent much of his career trying to help people in underserved markets get access to better opportunities through technology and entrepreneurship. Mark was a venture investor for a decade, and worked with over 20 companies doing business in adtech, fintech, healthcare, and energy in markets ranging from the US and China to India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Working with Vinod Khosla at Khosla Impact, he led investments in Kopo Kopo, NeoGrowth, Milaap, Branch, and Flutterwave; and he was an investor in all three of Elon Musk's companies during his time at DFJ.

Amir leads Fintech and Insurtech investing at AV8 Ventures and has been one of the earliest investors in the Insurtech space. Amir has been an entrepreneur, operator and investor with over 15 years of experience, working with early and mid-stage companies on financing, partnerships and strategic growth initiatives. Prior to AV8, Amir was an investment director and founding team member at Munich Re Ventures where he lead and managed investment efforts for two of the funds and made early bets in Insurtech, Mobility and Digital Health in companies like Next Insurance, Inshur, HDVI, Spruce, Ridecell, Babylon Health etc.. Earlier Amir worked for several venture funds, including Route 66 Ventures, focusing on Fintech and Insurtech, and investing in companies such as Simplesurance and DriveWealth. He began his career in Germany as a network engineer and subsequently at Legodo AG (acquired by Open Text, OTEX (NASDAQ)), an enterprise software startup, where he held several roles in sales, business development and prod

Vivek is a Principal at Commerce Ventures, an early stage fintech, insurtech and retailtech focused fund based in SF. The Fund's investments include companies like Bill.com, Marqeta, Forter, Socure, MX, Moov and +80 others. His investment focus includes vertical FinTech platforms, core fintech enablers and insurance data & tech platforms. Prior to Commerce Ventures, Vivek was part of the investment banking team at Financial Technology Partners where he worked on M&A and private placement transactions for numerous growth and late stage FinTechs.   SPONSORED BY TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

John Lunn is the Founder and CEO of cloud payment orchestration platform Gr4vy. He is a technology and fintech entrepreneur with 21 years of experience working and investing in financial services, commerce enablement, e-payments, data, security and infrastructure. Lunn worked as the Director of Technology for six years at CyberSource, the world’s first payment service provider, which was sold to Visa for $2Bn in 2010. He then helped found Passmark Security which was sold to RSA Security in 2006. In 2006, Lunn joined PayPal as the fourth employee in the UK (now 2,000+), where as Global Director of Developer and Startup Relations, he built and grew PayPal’s first Developer Relations team. In 2015, he was instrumental to the purchase of Braintree by PayPal and joined the team. In 2016, Lunn was part of the team that launched PayPal Ventures, the venture capital arm of PayPal, a $350m fund with backing from the Board. Lunn was a Board Observer for Dosh, Arkose, Raise, Acorns, Toss and many others.

Robin Gandhi is the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Payments at TripActions. He leads the product, engineering, design, and operations efforts for TripActions' Liquid offering, the next-generation spend management solution. Prior to TripActions, Robin headed Adyen's global issuing offering as well as acquiring and partnerships for North America, working with the global card schemes, banks, financial institutions, and third-party partners that make omnichannel commerce possible for their merchants across the globe. He has a strong payments background, having come to Adyen from Digital River World Payments. In addition, Robin has more than 10 years in management consulting, having spent time at Accenture, Mitchell Madison Group, and also founding his own firm, Broadroots Consulting, which was acquired by the New York-based agency, Converseon. Robin holds an MBA from the top-ranked INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. SPONSORED BY TACEN https://www.tacen.com/

Hammad Aslam is an investor at Susa Ventures, where he focuses on Series B and Series C investments out of Susa's Opportunity Fund, and specializes in fintech, supply chain / logistics, enterprise software and emerging markets. Prior to joining Susa, Hammad helped lead technology and software investments at Vista Equity Partners. Hammad also brings extensive technology M&A and capital raising experience from his time at Morgan Stanley. He graduated with honors from Princeton University, with an AB in Near Eastern Studies and is based in San Francisco Bay Area.

Michelle is responsible for researching and executing on investment opportunities in proptech. She’s particularly interested in opportunities around democratizing home ownership, increasing transparency across the real estate transaction and automating workflows. Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Michelle was a Senior Associate in Financial Advisory at Deloitte. As a part of the Valuations group, she provided valuation services to both public and private companies related to mergers and acquisitions, financial reporting, tax, and litigation. Michelle is a Chartered Accountant (CA), Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and Chartered Business Valuator (CBV). She has a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University.In 2020, Michelle was named one of Venture Capital Journal’s "40 Rising Stars under 40" in the global venture community.

Deep has more than 20 years of Silicon Valley experience creating consumer-focused products, developing platform experiences that use artificial intelligence and big data, and building world-class engineering teams. His experience includes companies like IBM, Yahoo!, Trulia/Zillow, and over 5 years of startup experience. He is leading Varo’s Technology teams to build Technology Bank from the ground-up to scale to millions of customers. He holds a Masters' degree and an MBA from UC Berkeley. Twitter is @varmadeep (Varo's is @VaroBank).

Sheel is CoFounder of Better Tomorrow, a $75M seed stage venture capital fund investing in Fintech companies globally. His own startup experience includes 2 successful FinTech exits – a payments company and a high-stakes auction company, and he was previously GP of the 500 Fintech fund. He formerly worked as a financial services consultant at BCG and started his FinTech career at the non-profit p2p lender Kiva.

Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast.  TenOneTen is a venture fund based in LA investing in early stage software and data companies.   Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of recently public Shift Technologies (Nasdaq : SFT), an online marketplace for used cars. In her spare time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.