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Hey fintech fam, 💜

You know that Sabrina Carpenter line—“Busy woman all the time”? Yeah. That’s been looping in my head on repeat because whew, it’s been non-stop lately.

Since touching down back in NYC, it’s been full steam ahead:

✅ Season 2 of Fintech Mavericks is live

✅ Two new summits in the works (👀 climate, capital, and SF power moves)

✅ And the inbox is giving Olympic-level gymnastics—but we’re still standing.

Honestly? I’m feeling it. Not the burnout—the buzz.

Because what we’re building together actually matters. From shaping the next chapter of fintech to making sure we don’t just have a seat at the table—but the mic, the funding, and the strategy—we’re just getting started.

In this week’s newsletter, I’ve got:

• Two must-read stories about the future of women entrepreneurs and AI’s next chapter.

• A powerhouse new podcast drop to kick off Season 2 with a banger.

Let’s get into it.

SPONSORED BY AKOYA

In fintech, trust isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s your growth engine.

Earlier this month, I sat down with Paul LaRusso, CEO of Akoya, to talk about why real trust starts with infrastructure.

The kind that’s built for today’s digital financial lives—where consumers want control, transparency, and security every time they connect an app to their bank account.

Akoya was born to solve that.

Their API-only platform gives financial institutions and fintechs a single solution to enable secure, consent-based data sharing—no screen scraping, no shady handoffs. Just clean, clear, compliant rails that empower your customers and protect your brand.

Want to see how it works?

👉 Request a demo and find out how Akoya can future-proof your data strategy.

Because in this era of digital finance, the companies that prioritize consumer protection? They’re the ones winning long-term.

#TRENDING

What’s Up In Fintech

Every Thursday, I bring you the latest fintech news and trends, delivering the key insights that matter most to the industry—and you.

#1 Women Founders Are Scaling, Raising, and Acquiring Faster Than Their Peers

More than half of women entrepreneurs saw revenue grow this year. Two-thirds expect even more growth in 2026. And nearly one in four plan to do a deal—buying or selling—in the next 12 months.

That’s according to Capstone Partners’ 2025 Women Entrepreneurs Study, which surveyed over 200 female founders across the U.S. to understand how women are funding, scaling, and planning for exits. Fintech was the second most represented sector.

The findings show a clear shift: women are operating not from caution—but from confidence.

In short: female founders are raising more capital, planning bigger moves, and taking bolder bets than the broader market.

And in fintech—where data, growth, and trust intersect—that mindset is fast becoming the new standard.

The Capital Shift

The system isn’t always set up for them—but women are raising capital and driving growth anyway:

• 32% raised equity to fuel growth.
  

• 20% secured debt financing in the past year—a figure that doubles among women running companies with 100+ employees.

What’s notable is the intent: this isn’t just runway extension. It’s strategic scaling, backed by data and driven by conviction.

M&A Moves—And Exit on Their Terms

The M&A numbers are especially telling.

Nearly 23% of women founders say they plan to engage in M&A this year—either as a buyer or seller. Another 22.2% are actively exploring acquisitions as an exit strategy.

That’s a significant jump from 2024—and far above the middle market average.

What’s more: three in four women founders have already taken concrete steps to prepare for an eventual exit. That includes everything from hiring investment bankers to defining deal criteria—well ahead of when many male founders typically start the process.

As Capstone reports, this early preparation is helping ease the most common anxieties: from unfamiliarity with the M&A process to concerns around employee impact and timing. The only concern that rose? Emotional attachment to the company. And that just reinforces what we already know: women founders build with care.

Playing Offense in Fintech

For the Fintech Is Femme community, the parallels are clear. Women building in fintech have long been navigating legacy barriers—fighting to raise capital, win trust, and drive innovation in an industry still catching up to reality.

But the Capstone data shows something powerful: that’s changing.

Female fintech founders are:

• Driving organic growth while aggressively exploring acquisitions
  

• Prioritizing control, not just scale
  

• Building toward exits without compromising values
  

• Using capital to lead—not just survive

This isn’t a story about women keeping pace. It’s about how they’re pulling ahead—quietly and strategically.

The Bottom Line

Women founders aren’t just reacting to the market. They’re shaping it.

They’re building growth engines, raising capital on their own terms, and preparing for exits with more clarity—and less compromise—than ever before.

And in fintech? That’s not just a data point. That’s a playbook.

To access the full report, click here.

#2 What Mira Murati’s Next Move Could Mean for Fintech

Women founders are not only securing capital—they’re driving smarter, more strategic growth. This week, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is unveiling her new venture, according to The Information.

It’s called Thinking Machines Lab, and the vision is big: custom-built AI models tailored to a company’s exact KPIs. Think reinforcement learning fine-tuned to your balance sheet—not just a generic chatbot.

Murati, who played a pivotal role in OpenAI’s rise and briefly served as CEO during last year’s leadership shakeup, has already raised $2 billion at a reported $10 billion valuation. 

Now she’s recruiting top AI talent and looking to leapfrog rivals by stitching together layers from open-source models—essentially building faster, cheaper, and smarter.

She’s been at the center of the AI revolution—but now she’s stepping out to build her own.

The Infrastructure Move Everyone Missed

If it works, this could be a massive unlock for fintechs. Imagine AI tools designed specifically to improve underwriting accuracy, optimize fraud detection, or personalize financial products—not in broad strokes, but in laser focus based on your company’s exact growth and risk metrics.

And let’s be clear: Murati isn’t just building another AI tool. She’s rethinking what enterprise AI should look like—and that has big implications for fintech founders looking to scale smarter, not just faster.

If women entrepreneurs are already outperforming their peers in capital strategy and exit planning, Murati’s bet signals the next frontier: women building the deeptech layer that powers the next generation of growth.

This isn’t just another AI startup racing to compete with OpenAI or Anthropic.

Murati is reportedly creating something quieter—and possibly more powerful: a B2B platform where companies can access reinforcement-learning-powered models built around their actual metrics. She’s essentially flipping the script on traditional SaaS by building dynamic systems that learn your business in real time and optimize against your goals.

And she’s doing it efficiently. Instead of training massive models from scratch, Murati plans to combine layers from open-source architectures, reducing both time-to-market and compute costs. It’s like remixing the best components of AI into a model built specifically for you.

Her “RL for businesses” approach could become the infrastructure for a new kind of AI-native fintech stack—custom-built, capital-efficient, and relentlessly data-driven.

Why This Could Be Huge for Fintech

The implications for fintech are enormous. Because let’s be honest: most fintechs aren’t building foundational AI models. They’re building user-friendly layers on top of financial data—and increasingly, they’re bottlenecked by legacy systems, thin data pipelines, and expensive AI tools that weren’t built for them.

But Murati’s approach flips that equation.

Imagine a credit underwriting model trained not just on anonymized datasets, but on your customer retention metrics, risk tolerances, and product-market cycles. Or an AI assistant that doesn’t just help with general customer service—but is trained on your churn indicators and LTV curves, fine-tuned to catch red flags before they snowball.

This kind of precision learning could mean:

• Lower CAC through intelligent personalization
  

• Stronger fraud detection via reinforcement-driven optimization
  

• Smarter lending models tuned to non-traditional credit indicators
  

• Real-time adjustments to product strategy based on actual KPI shifts
  

In other words, this is what applied AI could look like when built by someone who understands the difference between big ideas and business outcomes.

It’s also worth noting what this signals to a broader narrative we talk about often at Fintech Is Femme: that women don’t just deserve a seat at the table—we’re building the table, designing the protocol, and coding the neural networks beneath it.

Murati is building AI’s next layer with founder-first focus. And if she’s successful, fintech may no longer have to choose between scale and safety, growth and precision, vision and execution.

#3 Fintech Mavericks Is Back—And We’re Starting With a Heavy Hitter

The second season of Fintech Mavericks just dropped—and we’re kicking things off with someone who helped shape the playbook for modern fintech.

Adam Nash has been behind some of Silicon Valley’s most important growth stories: early executive at LinkedIn, CEO of Wealthfront, investor, advisor, and product whisperer. But his latest venture is something different—and more personal.

Now, he’s building Daffy, a fintech platform that wants to rewire the way we think about generosity.

“Over 60 million American households give to charity every year,” Adam told us. “But giving is still treated like an afterthought. Why isn’t it a financial goal? Why can’t we build around it?”

Daffy’s answer is deceptively simple: treat giving like saving. Build tools that make generosity automatic, intentional, and goal-based. Use behavioral finance to make doing good doable.

It’s not just altruism. It’s a new category of purpose-driven fintech that could grow even bigger than robo-advising or neobanks.

🎧 In this episode, we get into:

• Why giving is fintech’s most overlooked growth lever
  

• The psychology behind donations—and how tech can amplify it
  

• Adam’s lessons from building at LinkedIn and Wealthfront
  

• What it really takes to turn values into product

If you’ve ever wondered how to build fintech that hits scale and soul, this episode is for you.

Tap below to listen to Episode 1 of Fintech Mavericks—powered by Brex.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

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Join us every Thursday to keep up with fintech events!

_{FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19}

[NEW YORK] EMERALD CLIMATE FINTECH SUMMIT

It’s Happening: Sept 19 in NYC, During Climate Week

Where climate meets capital.

Where women lead.

Where fintech scales what actually matters.

At Fintech Is Femme, we follow the money—and it’s charging straight toward climate.

🌎 Climate fintech isn’t a niche. It’s the next power move in business strategy.

💸 $12B in ROI if we close the gender funding gap

🚀 Women-led startups are scaling smarter, faster

⚡ Clean energy, carbon markets, ESG—this is where the real growth is happening

I’m teaming up with Bhuva Shakti to launch something bold.

A strategy session.

A blueprint for what’s next.

Want in? We’re calling in sponsors, speakers, and climate fintech builders.

Let’s shape the future together.

🔥 Early bird tickets are already flying. Don’t miss out.

_FINTUNES

🎶 Kehlani - Folded

Feel the vibes, soak it all in - and wait until you see the music video, it's absolutely on fire.

_{LET’S CONNECT}

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🎤 Host an epic event by booking me as a speaker, moderator, or emcee.

📚 Increase your expertise by ordering your copy of my book, Fintech Feminists: Increasing Inclusion, Redefining Innovation, and Changing the Future for Women Around the World.

⭐️ P.S. If you’ve read Fintech Feminists (or listened to the audiobook!), I’d be so grateful if you could take 30 seconds to leave a review or rating on Amazon here. Your support means the world to me. A million thanks in advance!

That wraps up today’s edition—thanks for reading! Until next week, keep innovating and challenging the status quo. See you Tuesday!

Love,

Nicole 💜