Fern Capital
I’ve built and scaled a category-leading B2B payments company over a decade. I now work with funds on investment theses, commercial diligence, and introductions I can actually make. I work with the founders on the other side of that table too.
Begin a conversationOne sector, covered properly.
I work with a small number of funds and companies in payments and fintech. Every engagement is direct. No associates, no staffing model, no deck assembled by someone who never met you. The judgment that built and financed an operating company in this sector, applied to your decision.
Eleven years as founder-CEO. $7B+ in annual payment volume, 500,000 suppliers.
~$100M raised across eleven years, from five publicly traded banks.
One sector. Payments and fintech, and nothing adjacent.
Eleven years in the hardest part of payments.
I founded Finexio in 2015 and led it as CEO for eleven years, building it from an idea into a category leader in embedded B2B payments.
B2B payments looks like a software problem because the volumes are enormous, but the volumes are not the hard part. The hard part is the middle: enrolling hundreds of thousands of suppliers, executing across every payment rail, carrying the fraud and risk burden, and passing bank-grade compliance, all while keeping the economics intact. Most platforms underestimate it and stall.
We built Finexio to more than $7 billion in annual payment volume, $17.5 million in ARR, and a network of over 500,000 suppliers, with net revenue retention around 140% and payment contribution margins roughly twice the industry average, because we solved the operational grind, not just the interface.
Fewer than 2% of U.S. fintech companies raised the capital Finexio did over the past decade. I led the company for all eleven of those years and left it growing.
Concept to category leader, eleven years leading it.
~$100M raised, from bank strategics, not momentum money.
Built, financed, and transitioned on my own terms.
Built, financed, and led.
The full arc of a payments company, origination to institutional scale to transition, is one most founders never complete. This is the ground I have actually covered.
Build
Finexio, from concept to $7B+ in annual payment volume and a 500,000-supplier network, with rails embedded inside the world’s largest accounts payable and procurement platforms, with an AI/ML engine predicting the right payment method for each supplier.
Raise
Roughly $100M in equity and debt across eleven years, from five publicly traded banks, with J.P. Morgan as largest investor and strategic network partner. When the market turned in 2022, I engineered equity and debt to carry us through without a down round.
Lead
Eleven years leading the company through hypergrowth, through a market that turned in 2022, and through a planned leadership transition rather than a forced one. I left on my own terms with the business still growing.
Where I’m spending my time.
Advisory work follows conviction. These are the four areas I am actively researching, building networks around, and working in, with sponsors, founders, and operators already engaged in each.
Merchant services consolidation
The acquiring and payment-platform landscape is fragmented, sub-scale, and priced accordingly. The thesis is consolidation: assembling independent processors, ISOs, and vertical software payments businesses into one better-capitalized platform with unified economics. I am working this as a director and advisor who stays close to the deal.
Agentic payments
Software agents are beginning to initiate and authorize purchases. That breaks assumptions the payment rails were built on: identity, authorization, dispute rights, and who carries liability when no human clicked. The infrastructure to make agent-initiated payments safe and settleable is being built right now, and it does not yet have obvious winners.
The agentic factory
Two things are happening at once. Agent fleets are absorbing operational work inside financial services businesses: enrollment, exception handling, reconciliation, diligence, support. And agents are starting to build and service software products autonomously, not just assist the people doing it. I run both inside my own firm, on a self-hosted stack with parallel coding agents supervised across persistent workspaces. For a sponsor these are separate underwriting questions. The first changes what a portfolio company costs to operate. The second changes what a software business is worth, because it moves the floor on what it costs to build one.
TradFi and crypto, both directions
The value is at the bridge, not at either end. Payment routing across multiple chains and networks, bank deposits moving to tokenized deposits, and stablecoin reserve yield: who earns it, who shares it, and how it prices into a platform’s economics. I have done the work on both sides, including tokenized money-market integration and reserve revenue-share design for a platform holding roughly $2 billion in customer deposits.
Sponsor-side and company-side.
Most engagements start with a fund and end up inside a company, or the reverse.
Investment Strategy & Thesis
Helping funds decide where to spend attention in payments and fintech: which sub-sectors are structurally attractive, which are value traps, where consolidation math actually works, and what the next two years of market structure look like. The output is a point of view you can commit capital behind and defend at an IC.
Commercial Diligence
Independent commercial reads on targets: customer economics, retention and churn mechanics, competitive position, pricing power, and the operational realities that do not surface in a data room. I built and ran the operations in this sector, which means I know which claims survive contact with the operations and which are easy to present well.
Network & Introductions
Building the map: who the acquirable assets are, who the operators worth backing are, and which industry experts are worth an hour. Then customer and partnership introductions on the growth side. I make the introductions personally, from relationships I have held for years.
Founder & Operator Advisory
Company-side work for founders and management teams: pressure-testing the business model, building unit economics that survive scrutiny, positioning and sequencing a raise, and preparing for institutional diligence before it shows up. Private, direct, and written down.
One of the oldest plants on earth, resilient, self-sufficient, and quietly enduring.
A symbol of new beginnings and quiet confidence.
Start the conversation.
Every engagement begins with a private conversation. We would be glad to hear what you are working toward.