Suneera Madhani, founder and CEO, Stax, all-in-one payment platform
This past March fintech Stax achieved unicorn status after raising $245 million. It also rose from sixth on the WPO’s 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies of 2021 list to third. The list ranks privately owned, women-led companies that have generated at least $500,000 in revenue in each of the past five years. And, for the fourth year, the fintech was on the character traits necessary to navigate launching and growing a business.
Madhani’s parents are Pakistani immigrants. Her father owned cafes, restaurants, and convenience stores, which used credit card payment processing. Based on his frustrations and those of her customers when she worked for another payment processing company, she and her brother, Sal Rehmetullah, launched Fattmerchant in 2014. The company was later renamed Stax.
At the time payment processors treated small businesses like a commodity. The relationship was transactional, and there was no added value. “The card industry focused on taking, not giving,” said Madhani. “And there were all these middlemen charging fees without transparency.” Her idea was to charge a flat monthly fee for specific volume levels on an easy-to-use SaaS platform that helped customers gain insights into their business.
A finance major in college, Madhani is a self-professed data nerd. “I was obsessed with learning about the transactional data that’s taking place,” she said. “It was going into a black box, no pun intended. Why isn’t anybody doing anything meaningful with that data?” Stax customers could use data to determine which of their customers are returning, how often, what their busiest times are, and other trends.
Madhani pitched the idea to the credit card processor where she worked. “My bosses pretty much laughed me out of the boardroom, saying it would never work.” Undeterred, she started her own company.
“I had zero experience building software or finding Mr. Visa,” said Madhani. The following 18 months were an uphill battle. “I was rejected by numerous processors, investors, and banks. But I kept showing up.” For the first year, she sold payment terminals out of the trunk of her Volkswagen Beetle. Now the company has 22,000 small and large businesses on the platform, powering more than $23 billion in processed payments.
When Madhani looks back on how hard it was for her, she realizes that part of the problem was the bias she experienced as a woman in an industry with very few women. “There were few women, especially women of color, in leadership, let alone as a CEO. The financial services industry is male-dominated, stale, pale, and male,” she said. Madhani was also young, only 26. “So I do think that now there was ageism, too. I’m a kid without a Harvard degree.”
Once Stax had traction—$5 million in payments processed—Madhani tried to raise venture capital to scale the company. “I quickly found so much sexism and bias in the venture world, too.” As a 26-year-old woman of color, she was not taken seriously. Only 14% of startups with a woman on the founding team raised venture capital in 2015, according to thesource
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