In a challenging year for startups and financial institutions, these entrepreneurs, traders, and investors are navigating difficult terrain and making an outsized impact.
By Jeff Kauflin, Maneet Ahuja, Nina BambychevaAnd Emily Mason
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in early March, some panicked entrepreneurs took refuge in Brandon Arvanaghi the fledgling digital bank, Meow, which allows businesses to earn interest on their cash using short-term US Treasury bonds. By the end of the month, the 12-person company, then two years old, had recorded $500 million in revenue.
Arvanaghi and co-founder Bryce Crawford— who had worked together as software engineers at cryptocurrency exchange Gemini — have since launched a high-interest business checking account, partnering with traditional banks like Nashville-based FirstBank to hold customer deposits . Meow also offers a lending marketplace and helps founders obtain mortgages. Today, the New York startup has more than 500 corporate clients and $1 billion in assets on its platform.
Arvanaghi and Crawford, both 29, are just two of the honorees on the 30 Under 30 in Finance list for 2024, which covers traditional financial services, fintech and crypto. The winners were selected from more than 800 applications and were evaluated by four judges: René Lacerte, founder and CEO of publicly traded financial technology company Bill; Shivani Siroya, founder and CEO of fintech lender Tala; Ida Liu, the global head of Citi’s private banking business, which manages nearly $750 billion in assets; and Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, which oversees the issuance of USDC, the second-largest dollar-pegged cryptocurrency by market value.
Over the past year, as the digital asset market continued to suffer from a decline in interest from consumers and venture capitalists, crypto entrepreneurs continued to innovate and were heavily represented on this year’s list. An example is Aya Kantorovich, 29, who helped cryptocurrency broker FalconX build a trading desk supporting more than 700 clients. She is now the co-founder and co-CEO of Fractal, whose software helps large investors take out loans and execute trades in digital assets.
Jayendra Jog And Jeff Feng, both 27, left their jobs at Robinhood and venture capital firm Coatue, respectively, to start Sei Labs. After seeing Robinhood impose trading restrictions at the height of the GameStop trading frenzy of 2021, they created Sei Labs to create software for decentralized trading platforms. They claim that their blockchain’s finalization time, that is, the time required to completely confirm a transaction, exceeds that of Ethereum by several orders of magnitude: 500 milliseconds compared to several minutes for Ethereum. Sei launched in August 2022 with $35 million in funding, and the startup estimates it already has seven million active wallets.
Fintech founders also claimed several spots on our list. Kennedy Ekezie, 25 years old, worked in consulting at Accenture and in marketing and growth at TikTok before creating Kippa two years ago. The startup aims to be a QuickBooks for sub-Saharan Africa, offering accounting software and payment services to businesses with four to seven employees (including food sellers, clothing stores and grocery stores). It has onboarded 800,000 businesses, has 250,000 monthly active users, and processes approximately $400 million in transactions on an annualized basis. This generated $1.5 million in revenue in the first 9 months of 2023, says Ekezie, who splits his time between San Francisco and Lagos.
Nico Simko, 29, worked for three years in JPMorgan’s payments division on mergers, acquisitions and partnerships before creating Clair in 2020. It is a digital bank that provides access to salaries: employees can withdraw their gains from the moment they leave. Clair makes money through interchange (the fees merchants pay when consumers swipe their Clair debit card) and instant transfers (it charges a 1.5% fee). It has 250,000 registered users. Fifty thousand of them are active each month and 15,000 receive their salary directly deposited into their Clair account. Clair sells her product to companies, who then offer it to their staff; it’s available to employees at the Hilton-owned DoubleTree Hotel and the Marriott-owned Sheraton, among others. Its most recent valuation is $105 million and its revenue is $1.2 million in the first nine months of 2023.
This year, traditional financial services leaders made up the majority of our 30 under 30 list. Carter Frazee, 29, is a lead leader of KKR’s global impact strategy, a $3.5 billion initiative focused on private equity investments focused on climate, sustainability, education and inclusion. Frazee also leads KKR’s Pride Philanthropy initiative, helping coordinate ways for KKR to share resources with queer organizations globally.
Megha Gupta, Aged 29, he graduated from the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. During an internship at IBM Research several years ago, she earned a US patent for a cybersecurity method. Today, as a portfolio manager at WorldQuant, a $7 billion quantitative hedge fund spun out of $60 billion Millennium Management, Gupta develops and deploys systematic financial strategies leveraging machine learning, statistics and artificial intelligence.
Nikki Stokes-Thompson, 28, leads operations and investor relations for Ariel Alternatives, the first private equity fund launched by Ariel Investments, a Chicago-based asset management firm with $17 billion under management. She was previously chief of staff to Mellody Hobson, co-CEO and president of Ariel, and is the youngest member of Ariel’s risk committee. After joining the company in 2020, Stokes-Thompson led Ariel Alternatives’ $1.45 billion fundraising earlier this year for its first “Project Black,” one of the largest fund closings in private equity in the world for a new manager. Sovereign wealth funds, including the Qatar Investment Authority and the family office of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, have invested.
This year’s list was edited by Jeff Kauflin, Maneet Ahuja, Nina Bambycheva And Emily Mason. For a link to our full finance list, Click hereand for full coverage 30 Under 30, Click here.
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