Business Insider has been tracking the next wave of hot new startups blending finance and tech.
Startups include generative AI fintechs, ones disrupting lending and banking, and more.
Check out these pitch decks to see how fintech founders sold their vision.
Check out these pitch decks to see how fintech founders are selling their vision and nabbing big bucks in the process. You'll see new startups using generative AI to ease up grunt work at investment banks and private equity firms, fresh twists on digital banking, and innovation aimed at making it easier for consumers to gain access to financial services and investments.
SecureSave
SecureSave cofounders Devin Miller, Suze Orman, and Bassam Saliba.
SecureSave
SecureSave works with employers to offer their workers an emergency savings account. An emergency savings account operates much like a health savings account, in that it sets aside a portion of an employee's wages to pay for emergency expenses.
Yinon Ravid, the chief executive and cofounder of Albert.
Albert
Founded in 2015, Albert offers automated budgeting and savings tools alongside guided investment portfolios. It's looked to differentiate itself through personalized features, like the ability for customers to text human financial experts.
NDVR is a portfolio management app that customizes portfolios and investment strategies to the needs of wealthy investors. The Boston-based startup — pronounced "endeavor"— applies to portfolios holding between $1 million and $100 million, and leverages quantitative investing strategies, which use computers and algorithmic trading to decide what stocks and other assets to buy, a method typically available to only the largest institutional investors.
Percent is a three-sided private-credit marketplace that connects borrowers, investors, and underwriters. The marketplace is geared towards accredited retail investors but plans to support more institutional investors in the future.
Vint cofounders Nick King and Patrick Sanders.
Vint
Vint wants to make investing in wines and spirits accessible to everyone. In June 2019, it launched as a marketplace to enable both accredited and non-accredited investors to buy shares in collections of fine wines and spirits.
Antoine Argouges, founder of Tulipshare.
Tulipshare
London-based Tulipshare lets individuals in the UK invest in publicly-traded company stocks, and then pools individuals' shareholder rights with other like-minded investors to advocate for environmental, social, and corporate governance change at firms like JPMorgan, Apple, and Amazon.
Los Angeles-based Altruist is a digital brokerage built for independent financial advisors, intended to be an "all-in-one" platform that unites custodial functions, portfolio accounting, and a client-facing portal. It allows advisors to open accounts, invest, build models, report, trade, and bill clients through an interface that can save advisors time by eliminating mundane operational tasks.
Doorvest cofounders Andrew Luong and Justin Kasad.
Doorvest
Doorvest helps everyday investors buy single-family homes to rent out for passive income. Through its online platform, users can purchase and manage their rental properties.
Relief offers an app that automates the credit-card debt collection process for users. It negotiates with lenders and collectors to settle outstanding balances on their behalf.
Priyank Singh and Rohit Mittal are the cofounders of Stilt.
Stilt
Stilt offers loans and credit cards to immigrants coming to the US. The startup uses data, such as education and employment details, to predict an individual's future income stability and cash flow before issuing a loan, rather than rely on traditional metrics like a credit score. It also sells its loan software to other companies looking to offer a credit product.
Laura Kornhauser, and Dmitry Lesnik, Stratyfy cofounders.
Stratyfy
Stratyfy is a startup that uses AI to help lenders underwrite consumers without long US credit histories or gig economy workers who don't get a traditional W-2 from their employers.
Miren works with federally-certified lenders that focus on reaching underserved customers in low-to-moderate income areas to underwrite credit-thin small-business owners.
CollateralEdge's founders Joel Radtke and Joe Beard.
CollateralEdge
Dallas-based fintech CollateralEdge works with regional and community banks — typically those with between $1 billion and $50 billion in assets — to help analyze and price slices of commercial and industrial loans that previously might have gone unserved by smaller lenders.
Pinwheel founders Curtis Lee, Kurt Lin, and Anish Basu.
Pinwheel
Pinwheel shares payroll data to help fintechs and traditional lenders serve consumers with limited or poor credit who have historically struggled to access financial products.
Tricolor is an alternative auto lender that caters to thin- and no-credit Hispanic borrowers. The Dallas-based auto lender is a community development financial institution that uses a proprietary artificial-intelligence engine that makes decisions for each customer based on more than 100 data points, such as proof of income.
Justin Straight and Bernard Worthy, LoanWell co-founders.
LoanWell
LoanWell works with community-focused lenders to fill a gap in the SMB financing world by boosting access to loans under $100,000. It automates the financing process — from underwriting and origination to money movement and servicing — which can shave down an up-to-90-day process to 30 days or even same-day with some LoanWell lenders.
Parafin cofounders Vineet Goel, Sahill Poddar, and Ralph Furman.
Parafin
Parafin works with companies that other small businesses sell their products through (like DoorDash and Mindbody), to offer capital to these small businesses. Parafin's tech offering spans product, marketing, compliance, and IT support. It also provides the capital, sourced via debt capital providers, and manages underwriting and risk.
Reflexivity cofounders Jan Szilagyi and Giuseppe Sette.
Reflexivity
Reflexivity, formerly Toggle AI, builds data-analysis tools for traders and investors. Its investors include Wall Street investors Izzy Englander, Stanley Druckenmiller, Greg Coffey. Reflexivity's tech is used by ExodusPoint, Soros Fund, and Millennium Management.
Rogo cofounders Tumas Rackaitis, Gabe Stengel and John Willett.
Rogo
Rogo is building a generative AI chatbot for bankers and analysts that can automate tasks like creating PowerPoint decks. It was cofounded by former investment bankers.
QC Ware is a startup looking to cut the time and resources it takes to use quantum computing. The technology has potential to enable companies to do complex calculations faster than traditional computers and is especially helpful in risk analytics or algorithmic trading. The fintech is backed by Wall Street giants, including D.E. Shaw, Citi, and Goldman Sachs.
Eric Chang and Alex Schumacher, co-founders of Claira.
Claira
Claira is a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze financial contracts and documents. Its founding team brings experience from Citadel, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock.
Kirat Singh and Mark Higgins, Beacon's cofounders.
Beacon
Beacon is a fintech that provides a shortcut for banks, asset managers, and trading firms looking to use quantitative modelling and data science to help with analyzing risk, ensuring compliance, and improving operational efficiency. The company has been backed by Warburg Pincus, Blackstone, PIMCO, and Global Atlantic.
For years, the only way investors could figure out the going price of a corporate bond was by calling up a dealer on the phone. The rise of electronic trading has streamlined that process, but data can still be hard to come by sometimes. BondCliQ is a fintech that provides a data feed of pre-trade pricing quotes for the corporate bond market. It was founded by Chris White, a former Goldman Sachs exec.
Proper Finance cofounders Travis Gibson and Kyle Maloney.
Proper Finance
Proper Finance helps other businesses keep track of transaction data moved between third-party and in-house systems. In 2024, Proper Finance's tech and team were acquired by Intuit to help small businesses.
Jessica Chen Riolfi and Chris Goodmacher are the cofounders of Uprise.
Uprise
Uprise is an app that offers small businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers financial advice and tax-planning services. The San Francisco-based startup partners with financial institutions and other fintechs for them to offer Uprise's tech.
Productfy aims to help non-finance companies offer their own banking products without additional engineering resources or background knowledge of banking compliance or legal requirements.
OppZo cofounders Warren Reed and Randy Garrett.
OppZo
OppZo is a fintech that is figuring out how to speed up loans to small government contractors. It works with financing partners to extend working capital loans to firms that have won contracts, and who need cash to quickly ramp up their businesses, but might not see that first contract payment for as long as 120 days.
Decimal provides a back-end tech layer that small- and medium-sized businesses can use to integrate their accounting and business-management software tools in one place, and automate some accounting operations.
Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodgson, Now co-founders.
Now
Now is a startup, cofounded by politician Stacey Abrams, that aims to solve the capital supply chain woes that plague bootstrapped businesses that have to choose between paying invoices and keeping the lights on. Now uses its own line of credit to purchase invoices from customers, paying Now's business customers immediately. When the invoice payment is eventually made by the end-customer, that money goes to Now.
FlyFin is an artificial-intelligence tax preparation program that helps freelancers, who don't get traditional W-2 forms, with their taxes. It connects to a person's bank accounts, allowing the AI program to help users monitor for certain expenses that can be claimed on their taxes like business expenditures, the interest on mortgages, property taxes, or whatever else that might apply.
Worksome is a startup that wants to eliminate the extra work required to manage contractors and freelancers by automating the administrative burdens of hiring, paying, and accounting for contract workers.
HoneyBook cofounders Dror Shimoni, Oz Alon, and Naama Alon.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook provides payment and operations support for freelancers. Its $155 million Series D was led by Durable Capital Partners and included Tiger Global and Citi Ventures.
Jason Lee, founder and CEO of Salt Labs.
Salt Labs
Salt Labs is a loyalty and payments fintech that is helping hourly-wage workers build wealth through a rewards points system. In June 2024, it was acquired by neobank Chime Financial for as much as $173 million, according to a Fortune report.
Hive pools unused cloud capacity on people's phones and computers and resells it to businesses. It was founded by the former CEO of Symphony, an instant messaging service widely used by Wall Street firms.
Bolt gives merchants the tools to offer a one-click checkout experience. The e-commerce startup made headlines in August 2024 for its pitch to raise a $450 million Series F that would see once-ousted founder Ryan Breslow back as CEO and value the company at $14 billion.
Method cofounders Mit Shah, Jose Bethancourt, and Marco del Carmen.
Method
Y Cominator-backed Method Financial aims to help consumers pay off their debt by providing an application programming interface to move money more easily.
Lil Baby is an investor in Kasheesh.
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Kasheesh allows users to split online payments across several debit and credit cards. The financial-technology company positions itself as a "responsible" alternative to buy now, pay later services.
Atomic simplifies payroll integrations with its API, which can help financial institutions access financial data for verification of income and employment, offer consumers automated set-up or updating of direct deposits, collect financial obligations straight from consumers' paychecks, and more.
Kamino cofounders Gut Fragoso, Rodrigo Perenha, Benjamin Gleason, and Gonzalo Parejo.
Kamino
Sao Paulo-based Kamino helps businesses automate their payments processes, such as invoice processing and cashflow management. Investors include Inspired Capital, Flourish Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures, and QED Investors.
Slope cofounders Alice Deng and Lawrence Lin Murata.
Slope
Slope wants to digitize the largely manual, $125 trillion industry of business-to-business payments to help companies process customer orders, collect payments, and manage cash flow. It also uses AI to underwrite buyers and extend short-term financing. Investors include OpenAI's Sam Altman, Y Combinator, and Union Square Ventures.
Founded in 2017, Ladder uses a tech-driven approach to offer life insurance with a digital, end-to-end service that it says is more flexible, faster, and cost-effective than incumbent players.
Tanner Hackett, founder of Counterpart.
Counterpart
Counterpart is a fintech that applies data science to the commercial insurance industry to more accurately measure risk and find coverage that best fits the customers' needs.
Honeycomb is using AI to streamline the often time-consuming and expensive process of sending an inspector to identify potential risks of a commercial property. It analyzes a combination of third-party data and photos submitted by customers through the startup's app to quickly identify any potential risks at a property and more accurately price policies.
ValidMind cofounders: Mehdi Esmail, Jonas Jacobi, and Andres Rodriguez.
ValidMind
ValidMind automates risk-manages processes for AI models on Wall Street, specifically testing, verifying, validating, documenting and monitoring models. Its $8.1 million seed round was led by Point72 Ventures.
Spade cofounders Cooper Hart, Tess Bloch, and Oban MacTavish.
Spade
Spade sells its software to banks and fintechs so they have more granular payments data about merchants to mitigate fraud. Its Series A was led by Flourish Ventures and included Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Everywhere Ventures (The Fund).
Themis develops compliance software for banks, fintechs, and the companies they work. Founder and CEO Neepa Patel worked as a bank regulator at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and in compliance at Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.
Zamp's Clete Werts, Edward Lando, and Rohit Bhadange.
Zamp
Most people think of sales tax as a couple of dollars tacked onto their grocery receipt, but for the seller, managing those dollars on every single product is more complex. Zamp aims to help online sellers of all sizes manage their sales tax compliance.
LeapXpert is helping companies ensure the messaging channels employees use to communicate professionally are safe and compliant. Monitoring business discussions outside traditional channels has been a sore spot for Wall Street firms, and a regulatory crackdown in recent years has meant firms have gotten more aggressive in their monitoring efforts.
