Behind Company Lines

With experience in the payments industry for over a decade, Caleb Avery was often asked to help software companies who were looking to monetize their payments. Unable to find a solution that didn’t require his clients to compromise on either technology, user experience, or economics, he decided that he needed his own solution.

That led him to build Tilled and create PayFac-as-a-Service.

Caleb first started working in the payments industry while in college, co-founding a credit card processing independent sales organization, or ISO, with a few of his friends. Beginning with very traditional credit card processing customers including restaurants, salons, liquor stores and other brick and mortar businesses, Merchant Services Done Right later expanded into processing services for e-commerce businesses, software companies and now operates in 22+ states across the country.

Over the years, he also consulted for larger software companies processing anywhere from $100 million to over a billion in annual payments volume. These clients needed a payments expert to help them negotiate agreements, develop new pricing models, and maximize their revenue from credit card processing.

It was while working with these businesses that Caleb had a realization: software companies wanting to optimize their integrated payment processing solution were really looking for two key things. One, an instant digital sign-up experience for their customers. And two, to maximize the revenue they could earn.

Tilled’s revolutionary PayFac-as-a-Service platform allows software companies to enjoy all of the benefits of becoming a PayFac without any of the upfront investment or ongoing overheads, all while capturing the lion’s share of the economics.

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Daniel Baraghoush is the Founder and CEO of ArcadeQuest. He's won awards for entrepreneurship, innovation, and filmmaking. His background is in gaming, capital markets, and marketing. Daniel has worked with companies that surpassed the $1Bn market cap.

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As a child growing up in Los Angeles, Jean Smart watched her immigrant parents work tirelessly to provide for their family and employees.

Owners of a grocery store and a restaurant; Jean’s parents valued education and hard work. While her parents took care of everyone around them, they didn’t formally invest in their retirement, leaving them vulnerable in their later years. Jean’s parents were an all too familiar story in the US; equal parts inspiration and cautionary tale.

After a career in financial services, Jean decided to start Penelope - a 401(k) platform focused on micro and small businesses. Monica Barry joined as a co-founder and remains an advisor. Today, Jean and the Penelope team are on a mission to enable every small business owner and employee to build a bright financial future.

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Danny Nathan is the consummate "square peg." Throughout his career, he's been called a product person, a UX guy, a designer, a strategist, and a marketer (and a few other choice names like "The Cleaner"). And with over 18 years of experience in product, design, and technology, most of those are spot-on. 

Today, Danny leads the team at Apollo 21 — an entrepreneurially-minded crew focused on building products, services, and companies. Apollo 21 sits somewhere between software consultancy and venture studio. The team works with clients ranging from small startups who are building their first product to multi-billion dollar corporations looking to generate operational efficiency through the creation of bespoke technology. 

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Pranav Buggana joined the Climate Fight in Sumer 2022 after 3 years of working in Data Science/ML Engineering for manufacturing, media, and political campaigns. He is a solo founder of his first Startup, Toohla, which is dedicated to empowering individuals to fight climate change. Toohla's mission is to jumpstart a global Sustainability Movement through a Gamified app where Individuals can track, reduce and offset their emissions.

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Rijul Gupta is a Synthetic-Media expert and thought leader with a degree in Machine Learning from Yale University. Rijul has spent the past five years developing patent-pending synthetic media algorithms while pursuing various ethical-only consumer, enterprise, and dual-use applications of the technology. He has been featured in Forbes Magazine for his work as a pioneer in the burgeoning Synthetic-Media landscape. As CEO of DeepMedia, Rijul has won pitch competitions at Harvard and Yale and maintains relationships with Professor Zucker (Machine Learning) and Professor Staib (Signals Processing) at Yale University. Rijul is a Thiel Fellow Finalist and a patented inventor whose entrepreneurial career has revolved around the study of DeepFakes and the technology behind them He possesses rare and unique technical knowledge that is necessary to program and create a solution to this rapidly evolving field of technology.

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Ethan Castro is a hard-of-hearing music producer, songwriter, engineer, and inventor with Tourette’s Syndrome. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Composition from California State University, Fresno; a Master of Arts in Music Industry Administration from California State University, Northridge; and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Digital Composition at the University of California, Riverside where he invented his patent-pending audio technology that allows people to simultaneously hear and feel audio in high-fidelity. Ethan serves as Chief Technical Officer of EDGE Sound Research, Vice President of EDGE Original Inc., Graduate Studio Manager of UCR’s Experimental Acoustics Research Studio (EARS) facility, and was previously the Vice President of the Riverside Philharmonic and the founder of the EARS Student Group. Ethan’s 15 years of music production/audio engineering, forthcoming dissertation on tactile audio/multimodal composition, and a lifetime of practicing visual and touch-based hearing compensation methods position him as a leader in audio innovation and multi-sensory experiences.

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Or Weis is the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io a serial entrepreneur who is passionate about developer tools, previously founding Rookout.com, a leading production debugging solution; and “Upwards”, the largest founders’ PLG community. Before becoming a founder, Or worked as a lead engineer in multiple cybersecurity and big data companies, the intelligence corps., as a consultant for the Ministry of Defense, and as VP R&D at Netline CT cyber division.

Prompting better and safer engineering Or has been recognized as a Snyk Ambassador, and as a JFrog Superfrog

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Jeffrey Scholz is the founder of RareSkills.io, a remote-only web3 bootcamp focused on transforming junior web3 engineers into senior ones. RareSkills students have gotten job offers from elite blockchain companies like Trail of Bits and LayerZero. Unlike traditional coding bootcamps, RareSkills targets experienced engineers who are seeking to become genuine experts. Many of RareSkills' students already had jobs as smart contract engineers before they joined, and some have even had jobs as solidity instructors.

Jeffrey Scholz is the bestselling author on Udemy for intermediate and advanced-level solidity blockchain courses. Before he founded RareSkills, he was the youngest senior engineering manager at Yahoo, where he built the video machine learning team and platform from the ground up. He has two patents in machine learning and has placed in the top 10 in highly competitive international machine learning competitions.

He has a graduate degree in theoretical computer science from Columbia University. He currently resides in Jakarta Indonesia.

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Nick Jordan is the CEO and founder of Narrative. He has spent his career at technology-driven companies like Adobe and Yahoo. Prior to Narrative, Nick was the SVP of product and strategy at Tapad, where he helped evolve the company from a media business into a data and technology licensing business.

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