Flux

Avinash Sukhwani, Maximiliano Echeverria, and Fernando de la Torre looked at the global payments landscape and saw a massive gap: while BNPL was exploding everywhere, most physical merchants couldn't actually accept these payment options at checkout. So they built Flux, a Y Combinator-backed company building the payment network for alternative payments—specifically designed to bring every BNPL option directly to on-site merchants so they can maximize their customers' buying power.

Here's why this matters: traditional card networks have had decades to lock down retail. Flux is saying "forget the cards" and building infrastructure for consumer credit products that don't even need a card to work. Their instant-issuing and payment acceptance solution lets retailers tap into the BNPL economy without being held hostage by Visa and Mastercard's fees. They're also rolling out a payment terminal specifically for alternative credit—non-card transactions—which is basically unheard of in the market right now.

Avinash brings the pedigree: he's got degrees from Cambridge, MIT, and Imperial College London, plus time at Rocket Internet and BCG. That's not just resume padding—that's someone who understands both startup scale and enterprise operations. The team is Madrid-based, which puts them in the heart of Europe's fintech explosion. They're hunting for merchants who want to stop leaving money on the table and developers who want to build the future of payments.