Finix, which previously dubbed Cincinnati a "second HQ," announced Wednesday the hiring of three C-suite executives from leading Bay Area companies, while also creating an avenue for 80 Black and Latinx investors to participate in the company’s latest round.
On the hiring front, Fiona Taylor was hired as chief operations officer. Taylor most recently was Marqeta’s senior vice president of operations. Earlier in her career, she worked at Visa and Solar City, which was acquired by Tesla. Her role was previously held by co-founder Sean Donovan, who is based in Cincinnati and is a Worldpay/Vantiv alum.
Donovan is now leading the company's financial partnerships and managing ecosystem relationships with processors, financial institutions and credit card networks. These relationships are vital to Finix as it looks to expand its fintech capabilities and expand internationally, officials said.
Ramana Satyavarapu joined Finix as chief technology officer. He was a founding member of Microsoft Office 365 and the head of engineering for Google Play Search. Satyavarapu also led software infrastructure engineering at Uber. Most recently, he was head of data platforms and products at Two Sigma, a quantitative hedge fund.
Finix hired Adam Boushie as senior vice president of revenue, citing his track record of scaling businesses from small startups to technology giants. He most recently was chief revenue officer for Gloo, a Boulder, Colorado-based vertical software-as-a-service provider. Boushie also was an early employee at Google Cloud, where he spent almost eight years helping to grow the business to $8 billion in revenue.
Separately, Finix said Jareau Wade was promoted to chief growth officer from his previous role of vice president of marketing and growth. Before Finix, he led commerce and visual service business development at Pinterest and co-founded Balanced, a payments company acquired by Stripe in 2015.
“At Finix, we always like to say that we’re not building for the next year, we’re building for the next 10 years. So that means finding people who can scale,” CEO Richie Serna told me in discussing the new hires.
Finix will also be hiring this year, with expectations of doubling its workforce of 100 employees. The payment infrastructure company lets software makers incorporate payments into their services. A sample client is Cincinnati-based Clubessential, which provides software as a service to fitness centers, country clubs, resorts, and other membership-based communities that relies on Finix so its users can accept dues and other payments as part of its services.
Currently, 20% of the company's workforce calls Cincinnati home, according to a spokeswoman. The new hires are expected to be scattered since Finix has pivoted to a fully remote workforce in wake of the pandemic, though Cincinnati remains "a core hub for (Finix) given our strong payments teammates located there and our Worldpay connections," she added.
In addition to the leadership changes, Finix also created a special purpose vehicle that allowed more than 80 Black and Latinx investors to participate in the company’s latest round, representing $3 million or 10% of the company’s latest round last summer. Finix has now raised more than $100 million in total funding.
“People too often focus on one aspect of diversity, but it’s not just about diversifying your employees, leadership team or cap table — it’s about all of it combined,” Serna said. The company sees it as a way early-stage, high-growth startups can increase representation in the venture capital ecosystem and help close the racial wealth gap.
“The Finix SPV provides tremendous value. It allows talented, knowledgeable investors and operators from diverse backgrounds — especially Black and Latinx people — who have traditionally been excluded from investing early in rocketship startups to be able to do so,” Tiffany Ashley Bell, founder and executive director at The Human Utility and an investor in the Finix special purpose vehicle, said in a statement. “Finix’s success and the success of the SPV will open up capital for many more entrepreneurs and investors from under-represented communities.”
Serna told me diversifying the company’s investor base in this way was a high priority for him.
“As a founder of color, diversity has always been something that’s been incredibly important to me,” Serna said. “There’s often been a story that’s told about the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, and it’s usually been focused either on the team or the board — but rarely do people talk about representation on the cap table.
“It’s about helping historically underrepresented groups to build a track record. It’s about helping them break into an industry. It’s about allowing them to get attribution for their work,” said Serna, who hopes other companies will make similar moves to diversify their investor base.
Serna shared in a recent San Francisco Business Times interview he’s been on a nontraditional path to becoming a fintech CEO. Both of his parents emigrated from Mexico in the 1960s and ‘70s as undocumented immigrants and he was the first in his family to make it to college.
I asked him how his own background as a Latinx entrepreneur influenced his decision to create a means for dozens of Black and Latinx investors to invest in Finix.
“It’s almost impossible for me to separate the two,” Serna said, adding that only about 3% of venture funding goes to Black or Latinx entrepreneurs.
“It’s not hard to go into the room in meetings and realize I stick out,” Serna said. “If there’s something I can do to have an impact on the diversity of the ecosystem, I want to do my part.”
