15 Companies Building Tomorrow’s Fintech Leaders

By Gilgamesh Ventures and the Wharton School of Business

Everyone knows about the PayPal Mafia. In addition to changing the way money moves, PayPal has, over the past two decades, spawned several groups of revolutionaries who have reshaped the way finance works, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and others. But is PayPal the only example?

I’ve suspected for a while that this isn’t the case. So over the past few months, in collaboration with The Wharton School of Business represented by professor Dave EricksonMiguel Armaza and I set out to investigate whether other launch pads for entrepreneurship exist elsewhere in fintech. With the help of three extraordinary Wharton MBAs – Kirstie Irmana, Kris JenkAnd Josh Jagota – we found that others do exist, and several findings are very important. Let’s take a look at them below.

To answer our question, we set out to identify the largest, most influential fintech companies in the Americas. We started with hundreds of contenders and narrowed our list down to fifteen companies based on a variety of factors. For simplicity, we’ve dubbed these fifteen the “Fintech Families.” The impact of these fifteen companies is simply unparalleled, with nearly 2,600 founders in the Americas, of which ~12% (298) have founded fintech companies in the US and Latin America.

Beyond their operational scale and financial success, these companies have played a sometimes hidden but fundamental role in defining the future of fintech, through their alumni. But that’s not our only finding. The results of our research underscore resilience and growing momentum in these networks of companies and founders. In recent years, there has been a stronger wave of startups emerging from Fintech Families, with more than a third of the top startups in our analysis receiving funding in the past two years alone. In fact, 2023 will produce the highest number of fintech founders from this subset in a single year (27% of the entire subset, to be exact), indicating that entrepreneurs are not hesitant to jump into emerging verticals in the space.

Below are the fifteen Fintech families we identified, along with some associated statistics: