These entrepreneurs, traders and investors are making an outsized impact in fintech, crypto and traditional financial services.
By Jeff Kauflin, Nina Bambysheva, Maneet Ahuja, Steven Ehrlich, Lindsey Choo and Stephen Pastis
Credit card transactions carry little information about whom customers are paying. This makes it hard for banks to know whether they’re sending money to a bakery, a marijuana dispensary… or a fraud ring. “Banks are relying on data infrastructure from the 1960s,” says Oban MacTavish, 29, who cofounded Spade along with Cooper Hart, 28, and Tess Bloch, 30. Through data partnerships, AI and human review, the three-year-old New York City-based startup builds expansive databases covering tens of millions of businesses to provide banks with precise details about the merchant, business category and location.
The information is valuable to financial institutions in the complex battle against credit and debit card crime, which, according to Nilson, cost banks $36 billion globally in 2023. Today, Spade is an 18-person outfit processing more than $1 billion in monthly transactions for over 20 customers, including Stripe and Corpay. It has raised $16 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Gradient Ventures and Flourish.
MacTavish and Hart are just two of the honorees on the 30 Under 30 list in finance for 2025, which covers fintech, crypto and traditional financial services. The winners were selected from more than 600 nominations and were evaluated by four judges: Chris Britt, cofounder and chief executive of digital bank Chime; Marc Lasry, cofounder and CEO of asset management firm Avenue Capital Group; Laura Spiekerman, cofounder and president of fraud prevention company Alloy; and Nikil Viswanathan, cofounder and CEO of crypto infrastructure software company Alchemy.
Beyond Spade’s founders, several fintech entrepreneurs claimed spots on our list this year. Born in Mumbai, Mukund Tibrewala, 29, went to secondary school in Singapore. At 16 years old, he built three iOS and Mac apps, one of which became a top education app in Mongolia. He attended college at Carnegie Mellon, and after three years as a software engineer at Airtable, cofounded Salient in 2023. The startup uses AI to automate customer interactions for auto lenders like specialty lender Consumer Portfolio Services (CPS) and also processes payments. It reached annualized revenue of $6 million in 2024 and has raised $4 million in venture funding from investors including Matrix and General Catalyst.
At Vinovest, Anthony Zhang, 29, is trying to make investing in wine accessible to more than just the super-wealthy. The business is an investing platform and logistics operation: Vinovest’s robo-advisor identifies investment opportunities for clients, while the startup also acquires bottles and casks and stores them in specialty facilities. Vinovest has over 1.7 million bottles in custody and has seen more than 20,000 customers invest $140 million. Zhang, a C5 quadriplegic, says he has found community and new ways to make his life exciting and fulfilling through wine, aiming to be a role model for other paralyzed entrepreneurs.
Over the past year, digital asset prices surged, and crypto entrepreneurs continued to innovate, earning strong representation on our list. The most influential crypto founder who made it is Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, 26. During Covid, the NYU dropout launched the blockchain-based prediction markets platform, which allows users to bet on the outcome of events. It has raised $74 million in funding from investors like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Vitalik Buterin, and it processed over $3.5 billion in transactions in 2024 alone. Its crowd-driven forecasts foreshadowed Donald Trump’s presidential win. Recently, the startup has run into controversy: A week after the election, the FBI stormed the 26-year-old’s residence and seized devices amid reported allegations that the platform allowed U.S. users to place bets in violation of its 2022 settlement with the U.S. government. (A Polymarket spokesperson has suggested the raid was politically motivated.)
Cindy Leow, 27, another crypto entrepreneur, cofounded a quantitative hedge fund in 2018. Three years later, she launched Drift, which has since become blockchain platform Solana’s largest trading exchange for perpetuals, a cryptocurrency-based financial derivative. Drift has facilitated over $35 billion in trading volume and manages more than $400 million in deposits. The startup expects to bring in $40 million in revenue in 2024. Backed by $42 million in funding from investors including Polychain Capital, Multicoin Capital and Robot Ventures, Drift now has over 200,000 users.
After spending five years as a professional ballet dancer, Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, 28, earned a degree in neuroscience from Harvard University. The same year she graduated, she cofounded crypto startup Ostium Labs with Marco Ribiero, 23. They’re building a blockchain-based financial platform to trade commodities like copper and platinum and assets that aim to mirror international stock market indices like Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng.
Leaders in traditional financial services once again made up the biggest chunk of our 30 Under 30 list for the finance category this year. David Fershteyn, 29, is CEO and cofounder of Atlanta-based alternative investment firm Altera Investments. He manages $450 million in assets through investments in small and medium-sized businesses, private credit and real estate. Fershteyn got an early start in the business—he began doing private equity deals with the help of a local investment banker while still in college at the University of Georgia.
Evelyn Duan, 29, is a vice president at Sixth Street Partners, a multi-asset manager with roughly $75 billion in assets under management. Based in Austin, Texas, Duan has contributed to $500 million worth of investments in software companies like Bloomreach, SnapLogic and Heap, each with a valuation of more than $1 billion. She began her career at Ernst & Young before joining Softbank as an investment associate. As a first-generation immigrant, Duan mentors international students through Ascend, one of the largest global networks for Pan-Asian professionals.
Jenny Chen, 25, is a trader at Citadel Securities, specializing in trading U.S. Treasuries. She started her career at Deutsche Bank and worked in commercial mortgage-backed securities, working on deals for the 30 Hudson Yards and One Vanderbilt buildings in New York.
This year’s list was edited by Jeff Kauflin, Nina Bambysheva, Maneet Ahuja, Steven Ehrlich, Lindsey Choo, Stephen Pastis, Emily Mason and Veronica Irwin. For a link to our complete finance list, click here, and for full 30 Under 30 coverage, click here.
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