Sessions & Speakers for Go REstive 2026

Jason Wilk is the founder and CEO of Dave, the banking app on a mission to level the financial playing field. In 2016, he had a vision to disrupt traditional banking and the punitive overdraft  fees they charge to everyday consumers; fees which amount to north of $30 billion a year. Dave uses disruptive technology like A.I to deliver credit and banking services at a fraction of the cost of incumbents. The app has nearly 13 million users as of the end of 2024. Jason led the company from founding to IPO on the Nasdaq where the company holds a unicorn market cap. Along the way, Dave was recognized as the 6th fastest growing company in the country on the Inc5000 list as well as a member of the CNBC disruptor 50. In 2024, CNBC named Dave the best performing financial stock in the country, achieving 900% growth.

Jason is a serial entrepreneur, having started several companies prior to Dave including AllScreen TV (acquired in 2015). 

Immad Akhund is the CEO of Mercury, the fintech that provides radically different banking* for over 200,000 ambitious companies and individuals. He co-founded the company in 2017 with the vision that banking should do more than safely hold money — it should help people accomplish everything they want with it. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500M in total funding from Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz and others. He is a former part-time partner at Y Combinator and is an active early-stage investor, with more than 350 investments in startups including Rippling, AirTable, Rappi, Applied Intuition, and Substack.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

Shragie Lichtenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Flex, a fintech platform rethinking how people manage their essential bills. Founded in 2019, Flex started with rent—the largest expense for most Americans—enabling flexible payments for renters across millions of units, while powering billions of dollars in on-time payments for property managers.

Eden Ovadia is the CEO and co-founder of FINNY, a fintech startup providing AI-powered organic growth tools for financial advisors. Prior to founding FINNY in 2024, she worked at BCG advising large asset and wealth managers. Under her leadership, FINNY has raised over $20 million, from investors including Y-Combinator, Venrock and Restive, and now serves more than 500 firms, helping advisors with client acquisition, prospecting, and engagement through data-driven insights and automated outreach. 

Ethan Bloch is the CEO and Co-founder of Hiro, an AI-powered financial advisor. Previously, Ethan founded Digit, which helped millions of Americans save over $9 billion. He got hooked on finance at 13, day-trading his bar mitzvah money—and has been obsessed with finance ever since.

Kahlil is the CEO & Co-founder of Natural, where they build payments infrastructure for AI agents. They're raised over $10m from Abstract, Human Capital, Restive, Forerunner, Genius, Bridge, Ramp, Brex, Mercury, Privy, Vercel, and many others. Before Natural, Kahlil started Ivella (YC S21) a consumer fintech company.

Marco leads agentic payments and commerce partnerships at OpenAI. Marco was previously the founding CRO at Bridge.xyz, a stablecoin payments platform (now a Stripe company), Chief Business Officer at Brex, and Global Head of Payments at Uber from Series C through IPO.

Marco is an angel investor with Andreessen Horowitz and holds MBA (Harvard University) and Electrical Engineering (University of Michigan) degrees.

Arman Javaherian is the Co-Founder & CEO of Homa, an AI-powered platform reinventing how people buy homes. Homa helps buyers analyze properties, structure competitive offers, manage the transaction process, and close seamlessly — all while earning thousands of dollars in cash back. Previously a Product Leader at Zillow for six years, Arman built products used by millions of home buyers before launching Homa to create a more transparent, technology-driven alternative to the traditional agent model.

Agree Ahmed is the cofounder and CEO of Flowglad, a payment provider built for AI-native startups. Before Flowglad, Agree built multiple startups with complex cross border flows of funds - including an on demand grocer in Nairobi which in 2019 was the largest in its category in East Africa. Prior to that he secured one of the Kenyan Central Bank’s first ever letters of no objection for non-deposit lending. When he’s not building he enjoys researching and writing about history.

Alfonso is the cofounder of Crossmint, a programmatic finance infrastructure company. Prior to founding Crossmint, he worked as a Product Manager at Google and Meta, where he founded products such as “I am not a robot” reCAPTCHA, and the Google Assistant API in 2017, as well as foundational work for end-to-end encryption and automated anti-fraud at WhatsApp.

Erik leads Engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform. He began his career at Coinbase on the Machine Learning Platform before taking on engineering leadership roles at Clubhouse and Zora. At Zora, he oversaw engineering across protocol, backend, frontend, mobile, and security. After three years, Erik returned to Coinbase to lead the development of next-generation developer tools and x402, the AI payments protocol.

Charlie Wilson is a seasoned leader with more than 20 years of experience building and scaling high-growth technology and payments companies. He currently serves as Head of Venture Capital and Startup Partnerships and Interim Head of Startup Sales, Americas at Stripe, where he leads strategic relationships with startups and investors powering the next generation of businesses. Over his career, Charlie has held senior leadership roles at Visa, Green Dot, Dutchie, and Commerce Sync (acquired by Constellation Software), driving significant revenue growth, leading transformative mergers and financings, and helping scale platforms to billions in processed volume.

Thomas Brown is a senior counsel at Paul Hastings. J.P. Morgan has called him “fintech’s most famous legal mind.” Over three decades, he has represented nearly every major company in the space, as well as their founders and investors. 

This represents his second stint with the firm. Prior to rejoining, Thomas was a partner with and general counsel of NYCA, a leading venture capital firm focused on connecting innovative companies to the global financial system. While previously with Paul Hastings, Thomas' practice was focused primarily on competition law and legal issues affecting the financial services industry. He is a past chair of the firm’s Competition practice and co-chair of the firm’s Fintech practice. In addition to strategically advising payment systems and financial services clients across a broad spectrum of regulatory issues, he has litigated notable antitrust cases, including class actions.

Prior to first joining Paul Hastings, Thomas had served as vice president, senior counsel at Visa U.S.A. Inc. There, he was responsible for managing the aftermath of the settlement in In re Visa Check/MasterMoney Antitrust Litigation, including the dozens of consumer class actions that were filed following the settlement. He was also deeply involved in the company’s transformation from a co-op to a shareholder-owned company. He writes and speaks frequently.

Tyler is a Co-Founder and a Manager Partner of Restive Ventures. Tyler has spent the last decade thinking about how to make money work better. He co-founded Prism Money, a consumer-focused bill payment product that allowed for instant and free payments to over 15,000 banks and billers, in 2012. Now owned by BillGo, Prism is America’s largest real-time payment network. Following Prism’s sale, Tyler became entrepreneur-in-residence for the Financial Solutions Lab, a partnership between JPMorgan Chase and CFSI. In this role, he mentored 16 companies focused on fintech solutions to improve Americans’ financial health. Prior to starting Prism, Tyler worked in the Mergers & Acquisitions group at JPMorgan’s and Citigroup’s Investment Banking offices in New York City. He also worked at a middle-market private equity fund and served on multiple boards of directors. Tyler received his BA from Northwestern University in 2005 and holds a commercial pilot certificate.

Cameron is an entrepreneurial leader who has launched, built, and scaled fintech companies around the world. She is a Partner at Restive Ventures, where she identifies and supports early founders to build the world’s best fintech companies. Cameron was previously the CEO and Co-Founder of Azlo, a leading digital banking platform for small businesses in the US. There, she grew the company to support the financial and business needs of small entrepreneurs, and was recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 for her work to deliver financial services to businesses impacted by COVID. Cameron also worked at the international development agency Mercy Corps, where she launched mobile money and banking products in countries including Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Zimbabwe. Cameron has a BA from McGill University and an MBA from Wharton.

Ryan is a Co-Founder and a Managing Partner of Restive Ventures. He has spent the last 15 years identifying, supporting and leading market-changing innovations in technology. Since 2015, he's invested in over 60 early-stage fintech firms, which have grown to serve millions of consumers and small businesses and resulted in numerous acquisitions and one public listing. Prior to founding Restive, Ryan led the development of the Financial Solutions Lab, a partnership between JPMorgan Chase and the Financial Health Network. Before managing the Lab, Ryan worked with leading tech firms to develop payment solutions at Silicon Valley Bank. He also served as Strategy Group Lead at Enclude Solutions, overseeing global strategy consulting work around mobile financial products.