The magic behind serial entrepreneurship: How Suneera Madhani is translating the learnings from her first fintech to the second
- Building a fintech isn't a task for the faint of heart, especially given the current climate. But case studies like Suneera Madhani show that it not only gets easier every time you set out to build a fintech from the ground up, it also allows you to work on the ecosystem rather than just a narrow problem set.
- Madhani's story is an instructive example of how aspiring entrepreneurs can find the right muse, how they should build their networks and what levers they should pull to build successful business models.
Serial entrepreneurship is a state of mind. It has been hard enough to keep established fintechs afloat during the fintech winter; it is another story altogether building one from scratch in the current climate.
But some persist. Today we are looking at Suneera Madhani, who built and nurtured Stax Payments with her brother Sal Rehmetullah, to billion dollar success and exited the company. In 2022. What Stax was bringing to the SMB payment space was interesting, uncommon, and the reason for its growth: It offered merchants flat-fee subscriptions for processing business payments, rather than charging a percentage of every transaction like many of its competitors.
Madhani and her brother are children of Pakistani-immigrants settled in Chicago. And this experience of being founders from a minority has played quite a critical role in their most recent venture: Worth AI.
With Worth AI, Madhani and Rehmetullah are bringing a small business credit score to market that doesn’t rely on static data or the whims of a human underwriter. It circumvents the potential for human bias and prejudice by automating the underwriting process and basing it entirely on data.
Credit scoring for businesses isn’t jaw droppingly new – Dun & Bradstreet has been doing this for decades. But continuing their trend of taking a long established process and introducing one critical change like Stax did with a subscription-based model, Worth AI focuses on “real time data”.
The fintech muse
The idea for Worth AI actually emerged from the bullpen of Stax. When working with merchants and SMBs, Stax had to employ 40 human underwriters, which was 10% of its team and it took about 17 days to completely understand a client firm’s credit worthiness, Madhani told me.
Moreover, most of the underwriting decisions were based on static data that didn’t really get updated as the health of the business changed. “That’s why we have risk losses. That entire system was something that was broken. As a consumer, I can go today and buy a car if I want to. They’ll know my risk based on my credit score. There is standardization around my personal financial health, based on a personal credit score. We have no standardization on the business credit side,” she said.
It’s this standardization and improved analytics that Worth AI wants to bring to the SMB underwriting space. In serial entrepreneurship, challenges in previous ventures beget new companies.
How to build a business model
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