Fintech has moved far beyond disrupting traditional banking. Today, the industry spans financial data, digital investing, AI-powered lending, payroll, payments and the infrastructure that allows businesses to operate online. Behind many of these shifts are founders who built companies around a simple idea: financial services could be easier, faster and more accessible if technology were treated as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought.
From Plaid’s financial data network to Stripe’s economic infrastructure, these five founders have helped shape how consumers and businesses interact with money. Their companies have grown into major players in their respective markets while continuing to expand into new areas of financial technology.
Zach Perret — Co-founder & CEO, Plaid
Zach Perret co-founded Plaid with William Hockey and has led the company as it evolved from a solution for connecting bank accounts to a broader financial data and technology platform. Plaid was founded in 2013 after the founders encountered the difficulty of accessing financial data while building a consumer finance application. The company ultimately built infrastructure that allows financial applications to connect with banks and other financial institutions.
Under Perret’s leadership, Plaid has continued expanding beyond its original bank-linking capabilities into areas including identity, payments, fraud prevention, credit and financial analytics. In 2026, Perret has also been highlighting the role of AI and financial data, including Plaid’s work on foundation models trained on data from its network. The company’s reach has grown to more than 1 in 2 Americans having used Plaid, giving Perret a central role in the development of modern financial infrastructure.
Vlad Tenev — Co-founder, Chairman & CEO, Robinhood
Vlad Tenev co-founded Robinhood in 2013 with Baiju Bhatt around a vision of making investing and financial services more accessible to a new generation. The company helped popularize commission-free trading and built a consumer-facing financial platform spanning brokerage, crypto, advisory, digital banking and private-market access. Tenev currently serves as Robinhood’s Chairman, CEO and President.
Tenev’s influence extends beyond Robinhood’s original trading product. As the company has expanded into additional financial services, his role has increasingly involved building a broader financial platform rather than simply a stock-trading application. His background in mathematics, combined with an early career building financial technology companies, has remained closely connected to the technology-first approach that defined Robinhood’s rise.
Paul Gu — Co-founder & CEO, Upstart
Paul Gu co-founded Upstart in 2012 with Dave Girouard and Anna Counselman, helping establish the company around the idea that machine learning could improve how lenders evaluate credit risk. Gu originally built Upstart’s predictive models and went on to lead product, data science and other technology functions as the company developed its AI-powered lending marketplace.
In 2026, Gu took another major step in that evolution when he became Upstart’s CEO, succeeding co-founder Dave Girouard as part of a planned leadership transition. The move places one of the company’s original technical architects at the center of its next chapter, as Upstart continues developing AI-based approaches to lending across consumer and other credit markets.
Josh Reeves — Co-founder & CEO, Gusto
Josh Reeves co-founded Gusto, originally launched as ZenPayroll, in 2011 with Tomer London and Edward Kim. The company began with a focus on simplifying payroll for small businesses before expanding into a broader platform covering payroll, benefits, compliance and other aspects of managing a workforce. Reeves has remained CEO since the company’s founding and has consistently framed Gusto as a long-term technology platform for the small-business economy.
That long-term approach has become increasingly significant as Gusto has expanded well beyond its original payroll product. In 2026, Reeves announced that Gusto had reached $1 billion in revenue and more than 500,000 small-business customers, underscoring how a narrowly defined pain point can become the foundation for a much broader financial and workforce platform.
Patrick Collison — Co-founder & CEO, Stripe
Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010 after recognizing how difficult it was for businesses to accept payments online. Stripe set out to turn payments into programmable infrastructure, giving developers a simpler way to integrate financial services into websites and applications. Today, Collison remains Stripe’s CEO as the company provides economic infrastructure to businesses ranging from startups to major global enterprises.
Stripe’s ambitions have continued to expand alongside changes in how commerce works. The company is now developing infrastructure for areas including AI-agent payments, global commerce, financial services and tokenized or stablecoin-based transactions. In 2026, Stripe said businesses on its platform processed $1.9 trillion in total payments volume during 2025, illustrating the scale of the infrastructure Collison and his team have built.
Building the Next Layer of Financial Infrastructure
What connects these founders is not simply that they operate successful fintech companies. Their businesses have each tackled a different layer of the financial system: connecting consumers to financial data, changing how people invest, applying AI to credit decisions, simplifying how small businesses manage employees and building the infrastructure behind internet payments.
That breadth illustrates how the fintech opportunity has evolved. The next generation of financial technology is increasingly being built into the infrastructure businesses and consumers already use, making financial services less visible while potentially making them more integrated into everyday digital experiences. For founders like Perret, Tenev, Gu, Reeves and Collison, the opportunity is no longer just to build another financial product—it is to reshape the systems underneath it.
