Finance still feels old
Have you ever noticed that, for a massive industry that powers nearly everything else, financial services still feels… old?
After hundreds of billions spent on technology, every year, nothing ever really changes. Online banking has been the same for a decade. Paper and PDFs still move faster than money. Lots of people run around, waiting to push buttons. And the data that powers everything—from credit to compliance—is trapped in silos. It’s slow, brittle, and built for a different era.
Yes, we’ve seen major Fintech wins: Circle just IPO’d. So did Chime. Stripe is huge at $90B, but remains private. There’s been real innovation. But structurally? Not much has changed. Behind the curtain, the machine still plods along and people run around late at night fixing broken things.
We believe all this stack of brittle is a feature, not a bug — and a massive opportunity. There’s so much more to do.
Good news: The reset is over
The past couple of years have been a classic reset: Global Fintech funding fell 40% from 2021 highs, then rebounded 3% in 2024 as valuations normalized. While everyone was distracted chasing the latest speculative craze, Fintech quietly got serious again. Valuations are normalizing. The hype cycle has cooled. Liquidity is coming back online through first-generation IPOs. All the conditions required for smart capital to go hunting for what’s next.
We believe spring is coming to Fintech. Not a hype cycle. Not another app. But a fundamental rethinking of what financial solutions, processes, and infrastructure should look like.
Darrery Capital is built for this moment
At Darrery Capital, we’re building the firm we always wanted to exist but never could find: the firm that combines the strategic intuition of a great investor with the tactical know-how to catalyze meaningful change.
Our entire careers have been on the frontier of Fintech, scouting and building what’s next; not what’s slightly different from today. We’re uniquely qualified to both recognize what’s actually useful, and figure out how to get it deployed and scaled… the core skills required to help founders build the next wave of infrastructure that actually works.
We’ve founded companies that scaled to millions and helped define an entire category of Fintech that is creating tens of billions in enterprise value. We’ve led senior executive, enterprise-wide functions inside systemically important financial institutions, and helped change them through emerging technology and human-centered design. We’ve invested in—and partnered with—startups that are crushing student debt and driving financial wellness, increasing flow and profitability, rebuilding the financial stack, and ultimately changing how money and trust work in financial services.
We created Darrery because we understand what’s broken inside the machine—and we know how to fix it. Founders want us to unlock financial services, and co-investors value how we de-risk their deals.
Five Fintech Frontiers
The Fintech frontier categories we’re most excited about aren’t iterative or theoretical—they’re practical, necessary, and underserved:
Tradecraft AI that understands the nuances of the hundreds of apprentice-based niches of financial services, and then actions real financial workflows and augments decision-making at scale.
Stablecoin infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and programmable money, and will re-plumb the massive legacy industrial processes. Most of the $22T in annual ACH payments still crawls along at 1-2 days per hop. As of June 2025 we have crypto US regulatory approval in sight, and that world will change.
Agentic AI that acts as a teammate (or an entire team), and not a tool. Once this is hardened, its hard to understate the impact it will have on corporate organizational structure, behavior, and productivity.
Small business platforms built for the digital-native entrepreneur. They deserve better, and can get it when its delivered to scale through technology.
Lending reinvention that’s faster, fairer, and finally fit for the future.
These aren’t buzzwords. They’re market categories with massive TAMs and very few scaled solutions. We believe the next set of unicorns will be built here.
Darrery exists to find and fund them, then catalyze them to scale.
We’re early-stage investors, but we think like operators and strategists. We like startups at seed-adjacent maturities and in special situations, then seek to support founders founders along the long startup lifecycle. We understand regulatory complexity, go-to-market constraints, enterprise sales cycles, and human-centered design. We back founders who can bridge industries, create catalysts, scale intelligently, and actually ship product that matters.
If you’re building for a more inclusive, efficient, and resilient financial system — especially in emerging, overlooked, or deeply complex corners of the market — we want to talk.
Fintech is far from done.
Spring is coming.
Let’s build what comes next.