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My guest today is Oded Zehavi, Co-founder & CEO at Mesh Payments, a corporate spend platform that aims to empower finance teams at every company. Founded in 2018 out of New York City and Tel Aviv, Mesh now serves almost 1,000 corporations and has raised more than $60 million dollars in venture funding.
In this episode, we discuss:
His time at PayPal and what he learned there working with great people and many other future global fintech entrepreneurs.
“We were really trying to build the playbook how to go international… going from a company that is mainly US based, with a US mindset… to take a product internationally was an amazing exercise. Add to that… there were a lot of challenges on how to take such a product and convince the regulators in all of these countries.”
Walking the fine balance of fintech innovation, where you have to build and ship fast in a highly regulated environment.
“When it comes to payments, the only way you can do things fast is to bring solutions that are complying with the regulations and can scale… in our space, we are only successful if we can generate economies of scale.“
A birds-eye view of the fascinating Israeli fintech ecosystem and what’s driving it.
“One of the uniquenesses of the Israeli market, compared to the French one or some other markets, is that the domestic market is not interesting enough. Most of us are not even offering the service to local clients, so you're thinking global from day one.”
Oded’s vision for Mesh, where they are building a self-driving wallet for corporate CFOs… and a whole lot more!
“In the corporate spend space, technology really makes the difference… it's a one-way ticket, meaning a company that shifts one day to this new technology and to the self-driving automation will never go back.”
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.
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