#60 Fixing B2B payments using AI with Michael Young from Photon Commerce.

Welcome to The Fintech Founder Journey where we explore FinTech products, businesses, and leaders. I’m your host, Mike Scott, co-Founder and CEO of Nona Digital. Nona Digital is an expert firm that accelerates product development for FinTech & Blockchain scaleups.In today's show, I’m joined by Michael Young from Photon Commerce and we will be talking about his journey building an AI-powered platform for Fintechs, invoices, and payments.__________________________________Michael's early career was as an engineer at IBM after which he took a role as a researcher at Wharton where he worked on a bunch of things that I can barely even pronounce like being the co-inventor of the optical memristor.After that, he took a role as VP of Strategy and Marketing for a tech and education company. At around the same time, he co-founded Innova Dynamics which was eventually acquired by TPK in 2015. As this was going, he co-founded another business, IonArmour where he led the product, tech, and business development.In 2016 he co-founded an eye care company, Smart Focus which was a spin-out of Stanford and was featured in publications like the Economist and Wired.Michael is an advisor to CareNX which is a life-saving technology that has been recognized by Queen Elizabeth II and the Indian Prime Minister. In 2019 he was selected as one of the 100 entrepreneurs from around the world to join the prestigious One Deck program in San Francisco where he remains a Fellow today.All of this led him to his current focus which is the sole founder and CEO of Photon Commerce. Photon is an AI platform for fintechs that reduces payment costs by up to 33% while accelerating customer acquisition. It is used by over 120 fintechs and has processed over $11bn to date. Photon has an engineering heavy team of 25 and is growing fast. They have raised multiple rounds of undisclosed amounts and they already have significant recurring revenues. Michael is razor-sharp, incredibly focused, and seems to know what it takes to build a successful business - I’m looking forward to this discussion.__________________________________Today’s episode sponsor is Nona Digital.Working with us to create or accelerate your FinTech product means you get access to our expert product teams across design and engineering that have been building products together for a very long time.You get the benefit of a studio that is big enough for no key person dependencies to exist but small enough so that you are always close to the principals.And, you get the benefit of our reusable component library which means we are often able to build your product faster than anyone else could at a comparable standard.As one of our clients said, “Nona is the type of business that paints the back of the wardrobe. Because if you want to be the best, that's the sort of thing that you do”.To get in touch with one of our principals or myself, head over to www.nona.digital.__________________________________Thanks for listening to the show!I’ll be back next week with another episode to explore The FinTech Founder Journey.Follow Nona Digital: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube