These entrepreneurs, traders and investors are making an outsized impact in fintech, crypto and traditional financial services.
By Jeff Kauflin, Hank Tucker and Nina Bambysheva
When she worked for Apple, Kalyani Ramadurgam’s job was to block anyone on terrorism watch lists from using Apple Pay. Even at one of the most sophisticated technology companies on the planet, she was shocked that the compliance process—making sure that the company was obeying financial laws and regulations—was still analog and tedious. “It meant reading through not just hundreds, but thousands of pages of documentation,” she says. “Organizations were just throwing bodies at the problem.”
In 2023, Ramadurgam founded Kobalt Labs with former Affirm software engineer Ashi Agrawal to bring compliance into the machine-learning age. Kobalt’s AI models sort through mountains of documents to help banks vet their business partners, ensuring they’re following the rules, like halting money transfers from sanctioned countries and promptly disclosing security breaches. Her startup has raised $13 million and has more than 20 customers, including Celtic Bank and fast-growing fintech company Bilt.
Ramadurgam and Agrawal are just two of the honorees on the 30 Under 30 list in finance for 2026, which covers fintech, crypto and traditional financial services. The winners were selected from nearly 800 nominations and were evaluated by four judges: Naftali Harris, cofounder and chief executive of fraud prevention firm SentiLink; Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of asset manager Ariel Investments; Arvindh Kumar, partner and co-head of private equity firm EQT’s technology sector; and Alana Palmedo, managing partner at crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.
Beyond Kobalt’s founders, several fintech entrepreneurs claimed spots on our list this year. After growing up in Caracas, Victor Cardenas dropped out of Stanford and teamed up with University of Waterloo dropout Kevin Bai to start Slash, a digital bank for businesses that offers products like corporate credit cards, checking accounts and stablecoin payments. Today, Slash tries to differentiate itself from competitors like Ramp and Brex by tailoring its services to solve industry-specific problems. It has about 2,500 customers and processes $6 billion in annualized transactions, up from $1.2 billion a year ago. Slash was last valued at $370 million valuation in a late 2024 fundraise and is backed by investors including Goodwater Capital, NEA and Menlo Ventures.
After graduating from Princeton with a degree in computer science, Gabriel Stengel worked at Lazard as an investment banker for two years. In 2022, he cofounded fintech company Rogo with fellow Princeton grad John Willett and software engineer Tumas Rackaitis. The startup uses generative AI to automate financial analysis for investment bankers. In March 2025, it raised $50 million in funding at a $350 million valuation. It’s backed by investors like Khosla Ventures, Thrive and Tiger Global and has more than 40 customers, including Lazard, Moelis and Nomura.
Over the past year, as digital asset prices fluctuated dramatically, crypto founders continued to innovate, earning eight spots on our list. One of the most successful to make the cut is Asta Li. After studying mechanical and aerospace engineering and computer science at Cornell, Li worked for a year at Uber on its self-driving technology and became a founding engineer at self-driving technology company Aurora. In 2021, she cofounded Privy, which makes crypto wallets that businesses can embed within their applications. It has more than 1,000 customers, including popular crypto companies Hyperliquid, Lightspark and Blackbird, and has created wallets for tens of millions of consumers. Privy raised $42 million in funding from investors and reached a $230 million valuation, according to PitchBook, before Stripe acquired the company earlier this year.
Giovanni Vignone dropped out of Duke to tackle one of crypto’s costliest problems: bad code. Traditional audits take weeks and often miss critical bugs. Vignone built Octane, a real-time security system that uses AI to scan smart contracts in under a minute. Today, the software helps secure more than $186 billion in assets, according to Vignone, across over a dozen clients, including Circle, the company behind the $77 billion (market cap) USDC stablecoin. Backed by the Winklevoss twins, Archetype, and Circle itself, Octane has raised $11 million and is redefining how crypto platforms stay safe without waiting for the next hack.
Leaders in traditional financial services made up the biggest segment of our 30 Under 30 list for finance once again this year. Arkin Gupta was a vice president and head of the central risk desk at Morgan Stanley before he was hired by hedge fund Citadel this year to help build its macroeconomic trading strategy. At Morgan Stanley, he managed a $2 billion long-short equities portfolio, combining investing expertise with machine learning research and using AI for trading and statistical arbitrage. He coauthored a paper introducing the “Prediction-Enhanced Monte Carlo” framework, which uses machine learning to make Monte Carlo simulations that calculate probabilities of uncertain outcomes more efficient.
Annika Kim has helped deploy almost $1 billion across private markets since joining the Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS) at the start of this year, working closely with the $44 billion pension fund’s chief investment officer. She is currently leading its Asia strategy, selecting managers across Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan and India, with a mandate to build a $2.5 billion Asia portfolio in the next five years. Prior to joining TMRS, Kim worked at Goldman Sachs, Carlyle and Apollo, and was the lead associate on Carlyle’s $500 million structured PIPE investment into Glovis, a Hyundai subsidiary.
Of those named to this list, 30% are women, 41% identify as people of color and 73% are founders. All candidates in this year’s class must have been 29 or younger as of December 31, 2025, and never before named to a Europe, North America or Asia 30 Under 30 list.
This year’s list was edited by Jeff Kauflin, Hank Tucker and Nina Bambysheva. For a link to our complete 2026 30 Under 30 Finance list, click here, and for full 2025 30 Under 30 coverage, click here.