Aron Alexander’s entrepreneurial journey is a powerful story of perseverance, reinvention, and vision. It spans from growing up in London’s independent retail scene to founding Runa, a company reshaping how digital money moves worldwide.
In this exciting interview, Aron talks about his experiences with building, scaling, and financing his company. He also reveals the reasons behind turning down acquisition offers and his objectives and strategies for rebranding and repositioning his brand.
Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.
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Humble Beginnings and Hard-Earned Resilience
Born and raised in London, Aron grew up with entrepreneurship quite literally in his DNA. His family ran independent retail stores like groceries, bakeries, and clothing shops. Here, he got hands-on experience in pricing goods and serving customers.
“It taught me the day-to-day grind,” Aron says, “attention to detail, customer care, and the grit, determination, and effort it takes to build something from scratch.” But his childhood also came with significant adversity.
Aron underwent 20 operations before the age of 19, an experience that shaped his mindset around perseverance. “You learn to keep going when there’s no finish line in sight,” he reflects. “You don’t always choose what you go through, but you can use those experiences as fuel.”
These experiences laid the foundation for Aron’s journey as a founder, which is typically filled with challenges and uncertainty, not knowing what the future has in store. Particularly when he had to go through the life cycle of building his company.
Aron learned to make the most of every situation, and control and create something that mattered to him.
Discipline Forged in the Military
Unable to complete school traditionally due to health issues, Aron made a bold choice–he joined the military. “I didn’t have the best academic trajectory,” he says, “but I wanted to do something that rewarded focus and determination.”
The military taught Aron excellence, discipline, planning, and the power of teamwork. These skills would later become invaluable in the entrepreneurial world. Perseverance can open pathways to achieving things that one didn’t think were possible, he found.
Inspired by what he learned, Aron pushed himself to self-study his A-levels while working and earned a place at the University of Cambridge, becoming the first in his family to not only attend but finish high school.
At Cambridge, Aron deepened his analytical thinking and embraced a culture of excellence in not just academia, but also a multitude of different fields like rowing, footlights, and comedy. The university is a breeding ground of high achievers, Aron noted.
“If you work hard and master your craft,” Aron says, “you can achieve great things in any field.” Among the many skills he picked up were first-principle thinking and doing good research around the market, customers, and documentation.
Aron learned how to think about dispersing and disseminating information in a way that resonates with people.
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Building the Foundation for Runa
Before founding Runa, Aron built an impressive portfolio of experience. He started founding businesses at 17. During university, he interned in financial services, worked in trading and equity research, and eventually joined a payments company that integrated into retail POS systems.
These roles, including a forex stint at Maruna, gave Aron a comprehensive view of the money movement landscape, ranging from retail to fintech to investment, eventually converging into a clear insight. He found that he had a drive to solve problems.
Aron realized, “The traditional rails are failing businesses and consumers. Integrating directly with merchants allows you to build your own rails for digital money.” It all started with a $5 paper voucher he received in the mail. The inefficiency struck him.
“It didn’t make sense to pick, pack, and post something so small. But it showed me something. Money is just an agreement between two parties,” Aron says. It’s a medium of exchange to access goods and services, but it requires two parties to agree on that medium.
That realization became the seed for Runa. Aron saw that the multi-store voucher was running entirely outside traditional banking rails. He didn’t need a bank account to use it.
If he could digitize it, it could be moved to anyone, anywhere, instantly, allowing merchants to get great commissions. As Aron comments wryly, Runa is like a Venn Diagram between his post-university payments and entrepreneurial experiences.
The Birth of Runa: New Rails for the Digital Economy
Aron’s financial market experience during the university and exposure to technology throughout his different roles came together with Runa. Runa’s vision is to create a new infrastructure for sending and spending digital money, bypassing the traditional banking and card rails.
When working at the payments company in 2013, Aron realized it took businesses a year to get separate new accounts through the banking system. It took even longer to work with Visa to open a new account. Aron identified it as a crucial problem that needed to be solved.
Aron went into the market and validated the solution. He found that businesses were struggling with their payments, whether sending refunds to customers, rewarding employees, sending cash out points in a loyalty program, or remitting funds to a freelancers. His solution? Runa.
The Runa platform is an innovative rail that powers the new generation of payment use cases. It allows businesses to deposit money and instantly convert dollars and cents and pounds and pence into bits and bytes or digital mediums. The funds can move from pockets to something that lives online.
The Runa Business Model
Aron explains how the Runa business model works. Businesses deposit money on one side, amounting to, for example, $100K. If the platform sends $1 to 100,000 people in real time, each receives a unique link to Runa’s wallet.
This link can be used online or in stores across 5,000+ merchants in over 50 countries. “It’s an app-less, cardless, bankless way of transferring money,” Aron explains. Runa earns commissions from redemptions and payments and charges enterprise customers for access.
Customers use the platform since it is a novel, frictionless global way of sending and spending money. Runa started with digital gift cards and is now expanding. Aron reveals how they have built their own merchant network and are now adding other off-ramps to the platform.
Users can now move money into their bank account or to a prepaid card. Essentially, it’s about the ability to move money to anyone and anywhere, from a business to a consumer and direct-to-bank off-ramps.
Near-Death Moments and the Power of Belief
Like many startups, Runa’s early days were rocky. Initially, they got backing from a few angels and started gaining traction. However, Aron recounts a time when payroll was at risk, and the company was weeks from running out of cash. “Things were moving so fast… and we almost didn’t make it.”
Belief in their vision from early investors and early customers carried them through. “We built a concierge-style MVP, and when people showed they wanted it, we secured institutional backing,” Aron says. He recalls how people saw the opportunity and believed in him and his team.
To date, Runa has raised $55M. As Aron points out, entrepreneurship is a series of reinventions, and founders need to iterate and learn how things work. Understanding the art of storytelling and understanding how to plot a line from where you are to where you want to go is crucial.
Storytelling is everything that Aron Alexander was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.
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Aron reveals how fortunate they were to raise a Prophecy Round in 2019. The funds helped them overcome the product and go-to-market risks. But even that journey wasn’t smooth.
Aron describes a painful moment in March 2020, when several funds intending to support their series A round disappeared overnight as the COVID-19 crisis hit. “It felt like the rug was pulled from under us. But we focused on the customer, proved value, and pushed through.”
Rebranding: From WeGift to Runa
Aron explains that they originally named the company WeGift. He conceded the naivety of starting a technology company for the first time with no resources, and the attempt to tell a story. They were building their network using gift cards as a hack to get retailers to accept their digital money.
At the time, WeGift seemed like an SEO-friendly, simple way of explaining what they were doing. However, they were building a robust payment infrastructure, even integrating with Coinbase.
The company was cashing out cryptocurrencies in 2018 in real time, when the rest of the market was taking five days and charging a fee of 3% or 4%. They were also offering a bonus. However, the branding didn’t reflect it. “People misunderstood what we were really doing,” Aron says.
The WeGift brand name was quickly becoming a millstone. The rebrand to Runa was more than cosmetic—it was transformational. “Runa” evokes mysticism and instant value movement. It allowed the company to reposition itself for talent, investors, and customers.
“We were finally able to tell our story in a way that made sense,” Aron explains.
Turning Down Acquisition Offers
Between 2018 and 2020, Runa received multiple acquisition offers, especially from legacy players interested in their Stripe-like infrastructure for digital rewards and incentives. It was cool tech and would have been very valuable for the incumbents. But Aron saw a bigger opportunity.
“Tens of millions of people already receive money through Runa. This year, it’ll be 40 million. We’re on the path to impacting hundreds of millions, maybe billions. The near-term check didn’t match that upside.”
Their customer base included individuals who had received money in real time, with the ability to spend it faster than they would have through other rails. Aron’s philosophy? “Pain is an old friend. The long-term impact matters more than a short-term payout.”
The Vision: Making Money as Frictionless as Email
Looking ahead, Aron envisions a world where money is truly borderless, where businesses and consumers can send funds instantly, in any format, without reliance on traditional banking. Runa will have connected to every merchant that matters to consumers.
Aron wants to build the ability for anyone, whether it’s a business or a consumer, to send money to someone else anywhere instantly, outside the card and banking rails, in a personalized way, which is data-rich, faster, more economical, and drives more revenue for everyone everywhere.
Aron foresees an API to make payouts to consumers who receive that money in a real wallet and send money to each other. These customers can also use that wallet to pay another merchant.
Businesses can use Runa to send money to other companies, if needed, and unify all payment flows in one elegant, simplified platform where it’s incredibly intuitive to make money frictionless, just like the internet.
Currently, payments are more localized, and there are different wallets and formats people use like gaming credits or cryptocurrencies. The digital universe Aron is building will have money in many different forms.
His vision is to make all the forms interoperable and seamless with the mainstream economy and basically enable people to get access to goods and services wherever they are, whenever they need them.
If He Could Do It All Again…
If Aron could give his younger self one piece of advice before launching the company, it would be this: Nail the brand early. Messaging that resonates with the right audiences is crucial to inform them that you can deliver value.
“Branding was our biggest unlock. If we’d had the right name and message sooner, we could have attracted the best talent, customers, and investors. Distribution is everything and even the best product won’t matter if no one sees it.”
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The post He Raised $55 Million To Build A Digital Value Infrastructure That Allows Businesses And Individuals To Send And Receive Digital Value first appeared on Alejandro Cremades.
The post He Raised $55 Million To Build A Digital Value Infrastructure That Allows Businesses And Individuals To Send And Receive Digital Value appeared first on Alejandro Cremades.
