Vroon Modgill spent two decades in payments as an accountant, finance director and CFO before founding Sokin in 2019. The company launched as a subscription-based consumer remittance app and is now a B2B payments and treasury platform running across 170 countries and 70 currencies, growing 100% a year while staying profitable. We talk about the pivot out of consumer, where stablecoins actually earn their place, and why he thinks the moat in agentic finance sits in the regulated plumbing rather than in the agent.

What We Covered

• Twenty years in payments before founding Sokin
• Watching his father fill out the same compliance forms on every remittance
• Why a consumer subscription app was the wrong business to be in
• The 2021 decision to go all in on B2B
• Sitting underneath the payments, treasury and FX providers
• One integration across 170 countries and 70 currencies
• Enterprise direct versus the embedded partner channel
• Embedded going from zero to 40% of projected US revenue in a year
• Why most of the world is not card first
• Owning the stablecoin stack instead of renting it
• The MCP connector and agent-prepared, human-approved payments
• Nine dollars of revenue for every dollar of net cash burned
• The Series B, the Oxford Finance debt facility and the licensing build-out
• What the Manchester United partnership actually delivers

Key Takeaways

• The defensible layer in agentic finance is not the model. An agent that decides to fund payroll still needs an account, a license and a rail, which is why the licensing build-out matters more than the AI demo.
• Stablecoins work best treated as a rail rather than a religion. Sokin bought the engineering DNA, runs fiat and stable through the same licensed infrastructure, and lets the route decide.
• Consumer remittance is a price and marketing game. Being right about the problem does not make it the right business, and the enterprise version of the same friction is where the money is.
• Profitable growth is a capital strategy, not just discipline. It let Sokin raise equity into strength and add debt at a lower cost than dilution.

About Vroon Modgill

Vroon Modgill is the founder and CEO of Sokin, a global business payments and treasury platform he launched in 2019. He trained as an accountant and spent roughly 20 years in payments and finance leadership roles, including finance director positions at startups and, from 2017 to 2019, North America CEO and global CFO of a crypto payments company. Sokin closed a Series B led by Prysm Capital with Morgan Stanley returning, followed by a debt facility from Oxford Finance, and is the official payments partner of Manchester United.

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Paul Gu dropped out of Yale in 2010 to join the first class of Thiel Fellows, spent time at the quant fund D.E. Shaw, and then co-founded Upstart on a simple premise: the techniques Wall Street uses to price corporate risk should work at least as well on consumer credit. Fourteen years later, he took over as CEO from co-founder Dave Girouard, and six weeks after that, the OCC granted conditional approval for Upstart Bank. This conversation covers what has actually changed at the top of the company, why Upstart went for a full de novo national charter rather than buying an existing bank, and where AI is reshaping the parts of lending that nobody talks about.

What We Covered

• Dropping out of Yale for the first Thiel Fellowship class
• What D.E. Shaw taught him about applying quant techniques to personal finance
• The income share agreement idea that brought the co-founders together
• What changed when he took over as CEO on May 1
• Losing the balance of a three-founder culture, for better and worse
• The core personal loan business and the future prime borrower
• The trifecta of growth, profitability and credit performance
• Auto and home, and the race to contribution margin positive
• What conditional approval from the OCC actually means
• Why a de novo charter rather than acquiring a bank
• Where the existing bank and credit union partners land after Upstart Bank opens
• AI in loan verification and servicing, beyond the underwriting model
• What happens when AI agents start applying for loans on people's behalf
• Ninety-one percent automation and whether 100% is reachable
• The case that fixing the cost of credit makes most Americans 10% wealthier

Key Takeaways

• Upstart went de novo rather than buying a bank because acquiring one means inheriting someone else's loan book, underwriting practices and operational history, and the whole pitch depends on being able to stand behind every decision inside the bank when a regulator asks.
• The bank changes who originates, not who funds. Upstart Bank will become the principal originator, but Gu is explicit that the company is not becoming a large, equity intensive balance sheet business, and the bank and credit union partners keep buying the assets.
• The next AI wins are in verification rather than underwriting. A HELOC can carry several thousand dollars of human verification cost because county property records are non-standard and non-deterministic, which is exactly the kind of work a generalized reasoning agent is suited to.
• Gu welcomes a world where AI agents apply for loans on borrowers' behalf, because agents have unlimited time to search and no brand loyalty to defend, which favors the lender with the best rate rather than the biggest marketing budget.

About Paul Gu

Paul Gu is co-founder and CEO of Upstart, the AI lending platform he started in 2012 after dropping out of Yale as one of the first Thiel Fellows and spending time at the quantitative hedge fund D.E. Shaw. He spent most of his career as the technical half of the founding partnership, running product, engineering and machine learning before taking general management of the auto and home businesses. He succeeded co-founder Dave Girouard as CEO on May 1, 2026.

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Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no intermediary ever holding the cash. In this conversation, Arpit explains why he thinks the US is finally close to a tipping point on instant payments, why Root never takes custody of the money it moves, and how the company handles banks that can't yet receive instant payments.

What We Covered

• Growing up in India, and the ADHD diagnosis that pushed him toward IIT Delhi
• Why he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced one
• The nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same one
• Discovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-K
• Why 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the fees
• The dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start Root
• The heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking system
• What actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiver
• Why reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in payments
• How Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNow
• Where stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platform
• Why Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brand

Key Takeaways

• SMBs refuse cards mostly because of settlement delay, not fees — restaurants earning their week's cash on a Saturday night don't see it until Tuesday, right when they need it most to restock.
• Root never takes custody of funds. Money moves directly between the sender's and recipient's own bank accounts, and Root charges a fee on top rather than earning float.
• Reliability, not transaction volume, is the hard engineering problem — Root has built retry and fault-tolerance systems, using the workflow engine Temporal, so a bank outage doesn't have to mean a failed payment.
• Arpit sees instant payments as a market that hasn't tipped yet but is close — RTP and FedNow now operating together create sustained pressure that neither rail created alone.

About Arpit Goel

Arpit Goel is the founder and CEO of Root. He holds a computer science degree from IIT Delhi and a PhD from Stanford, and previously founded Gamma, a data-security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021, where he went on to lead product for the data-security business.

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