Articles by Travis
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Seizing the Fintech Opportunity with a Corporate VC
Seizing the Fintech Opportunity with a Corporate VC
Originally posted on Innovate|Finance By Luis Valdich and Travis Skelly from Citi Ventures The financial services…
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London Crowding
London Crowding
London is the birthplace of online P2P lending, with Zopa opening its doors back in 2005. 10 years later, more than 1…
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Super Bowl 50 - Analogous to the fintech battle
Super Bowl 50 - Analogous to the fintech battle
February 6, 2016 Sunday night, an estimated 115 million people will watch the Denver Broncos play the Carolina Panthers…
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Bitcoin’s got 99 problems, but Mike Hearn ain’t one!
Bitcoin’s got 99 problems, but Mike Hearn ain’t one!
A lightning rod struck the Bitcoin community on January 14th, when one of the currency’s core developers, Mike Hearn…
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A Fintech Rockstar Has Died
A Fintech Rockstar Has Died
Farewell Major Tom! The man who was alternately known as Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, and Jareth the Goblin King…
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Travis Skelly shared thisProud to see Pruven Capital’s first fund performing in the top decile of its 2021 vintage. We are fortunate to partner with a remarkable group of entrepreneurs. We are equally grateful to our LPs, whose engagement goes well beyond capital. Their partnership has helped us build a differentiated venture platform that connects ambitious startups with some of the world’s leading financial institutions. Excited to work with this team everyday in support of these companies. Ramneek Gupta, Sudip Chakrabarti, Brian Quinn, Jared Moberg, Zsombor VinczeTravis Skelly shared thisExcited to share that Pruven Capital Fund I, which is a 2021 vintage fund is in the " Top Decile" of its vintage per the data shared by Peter Walker from Carta below. This milestone in a highly coveted one for a First Time Fund, especially one born in one of the most unprecedented times (2021/22) and we could not have done this without our LPs and our founders who made this possible. Eternally grateful to our amazing LPs that are the leading incumbents in the Insurance/Asset Management/Retirement/Wealth Management ecosystem including Prudential Financial, TIAA, Lincoln Financial, Mutual of Omaha, WTW, Generali, Nippon Life Benefits, PGIM, Nuveen, a TIAA company, Generali Investments, Nissay Asset Management. Could not have done this without the valiant efforts of our #founders who work against all odds everyday - Thank you to Tylon (Ty) W., Anirban Gangopadhyay, Vitor Torres, Ankur Jain, Doug Tallmadge, Anup Chamrajnagar, Anish Chadalavada, Deip Kumar, Dominic Vitucci, Aviad Pinkovezky, Jeremy Zhang, Ansel Parikh, Spike Lipkin, Gordon Wintrob, Ricardo Josua, Jack Kudale, Taylor Justice, Daniel Brillman, Jamie Cuffe, Ethan Chan, Biswajit Das, Sofus Macskássy, Charlie Oshman, Nithin Michael, Arjun B., Zara Perumal,
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Travis Skelly reposted thisSo excited to see Pruven Capital's founding LP Prudential Financial, enter the UK market thru a partnership with Standard Life plc. Retirement is simultaneously one of the biggest challenges and opportunities in front of us all, given the demographic trends. The retirement savings gap today stands at $70T and expected to grow 6x by 2050. This will require all of human ingenuity to wrestle down and we at Pruven Capital are excited about the following three broad classes of solutions: 🩺 Healthspan extension leading to longer workspans and accumulation phases 🧠 Productivity enhancement due to AI 💲 Innovative Retirement solutions from the leading incumbents like our LPs Prudential Financial that can help bridge the gap If you are a #founder working towards this massive opportunity, please reach out to our team. Thank you Andrew Sullivan, Phil Waldeck, Jacques Chappuis, Jonathan Harris, Scott Gaul, Alexandra Hyten, Brad Hearn, Patrick Hynes and the entire Prudential Financial team for your leadership and efforts in this direction...Travis Skelly reposted thisA new chapter in our global retirement and insurance asset management strategy. We’re pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Standard Life plc that expands Prudential's presence in the UK retirement market and builds on our leadership in global pension risk transfer. The partnership brings together complementary strengths, including PGIM's private credit origination capabilities and Prudential's retirement and insurance expertise to support long-term retirement security and unlock new opportunities for growth. Together, we're expanding what's possible in one of the world's most dynamic retirement markets. Link to release: https://on.pru/3U8WbgK
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Travis Skelly shared thisY Combinator has funded 5,000+ startups. None of them are focused on annuities and that's not changing. YC just published its latest Request for Startups. Annuities didn't make the list. I asked YC's own AI agent whether any YC company, in any batch, has ever built for the annuity market. The answer: "There are Zero YC companies whose core product is an annuity." How is this possible in a massive and growing market? → $464B in US annuity sales in 2025. That's more than double Apple's annual iPhone revenue → 4M+ Americans reaching retirement age every year, most with no guaranteed income beyond Social Security And yet the customer experience is stuck in 1995: opaque pricing, paper applications, and distribution that runs almost entirely on commissioned agents. Enormous market. Terrible UX. No venture-backed competition. That's not a market to avoid. That's the setup founders dream about. Pruven Capital, we have our own Request for Startups: new annuity products, tools, and distribution channels. Our strategic LPs include some of the largest annuity providers and retirement platforms in the world, and we work with them directly to get startups their first real enterprise engagements. If you're building here, my DMs are open. My full YC agent convo linked in comments 👇
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Travis Skelly shared thisA stranger’s toe just tested Sam Altman’s travel advice. Let me explain. Yesterday I flew home from a board meeting with an AI startup that's absolutely on fire. Great meeting. The flight itself? Less great. My seatmate's bare (and unfortunately fragrant) toe spent the entire flight peeking through the seats at me. The absurdity required photographic evidence. Then this morning, on Ti Morse's Relentless podcast (link in comments 👇), Altman shared his advice: "Get on planes in marginal situations." When you're on the fence about making the trip, always make the trip. Travel is painful. But Sam's right. Nothing replaces showing up in person. Even with the uninvited toes.
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Travis Skelly shared thisWealth management just onboarded 6M new clients with an average age of 2. For decades the playbook started when the money showed up. A liquidity event. An inheritance. A rollover. Invest America Trump accounts flip the sequence. The relationship starts with a birth certificate instead of a wire transfer. Cradle to grave stoped being a slogan and became the product roadmap. The industry response has been fast: 🔹Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard are pushing into micro-investing 🔹Acorns launched a kids advisory board 🔹Dell, Nvidia and BNY are matching contributions alongside the 401(k) 🔹Brad Gerstner (Invest America founder) expects $100B in private contributions within a year Two impacts that we're watching: 1️⃣ The age-18 handoff. These accounts convert to IRAs at 18. Starting in 2043, ~4M Americans a year will reach adulthood already holding a retirement account. At 7%, a maxed account hits ~$1.1M by 45 with nothing added after 18. The advisor (which could be AI) that holds the client relationship at 18 keeps 40 years of compounding. 2️⃣ Wealth stack for minors. The entire wealth stack was designed for adults. Custody, KYC, suitability, payroll deferral, all of it assumes the client can sign. Nobody has built at scale for 70M minor accountholders: 🔹 Guardian-linked onboarding 🔹 Multi-party contributions 🔹 Match administration 🔹 Investment education for minors The 401(k) built the modern recordkeeping industry. This cohort is bigger and starts 40 years earlier. Pruven Capital is spending a lot of time on this, reach out to compare notes. What's the first product you'd build?
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Travis Skelly shared thisA plumber drove to my house this week to pick up a paper check. Not to fix anything. To retrieve a piece of paper. Software ate the world, but it never made a house call. Between the 2010s fintech boom and ServiceTitan's success, I assumed this was a solved problem. It's not. Home services still runs on paper checks, PDF invoices, and snail mail. Inspired by Cyan Banister (and my kids), I've been asking "why" a lot more. So I've asked every home service provider, the question. The answers: "It's just how we've always done it." "My bookkeeper needs it this way." "I don't want to pay the card fees." "We don't have time to evaluate new software." It reconfirmed my thesis: SMBs stand to gain more from AI than any other segment of the economy, BUT they'll be the last to adopt it. To be clear: AI isn't replacing the tradesman. The people who work with their hands are among the most protected in an AI economy and among the most underserved. Their hands aren't the problem. It's the back office: the invoicing, scheduling, collections, and bookkeeping that eat their nights and cap how many jobs they can take. Automate that, and the same plumber does more work, gets paid faster, and never drives across town for a check. Three paths I'm watching: 1️⃣ 10x lift over legacy SaaS - Purpose-built AI vertical solutions that remove the evaluation burden: George's Probook, Apurva's Avoca, Melisa's Netic. 2️⃣ Tech Enabled Owners - Younger operators are taking over. Brillian is helping SMBs sell and enable the path to ownership change 3️⃣PE Accelerates Modernization - PE owners are accelerating AI adoption across their portfolios thanks to companies like Chris Taylor's Ode while AI rollups like Cosmin's Accrual buy in and modernize from the inside, pushing the entire industry forward With the power of AI let's hope we can stop requesting paper checks If you're building here, Pruven Capital is built to accelerate your GTM reach out.
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Travis Skelly shared thisCongress passed the biggest housing affordability bill in decades. Opendoor already showed where the savings are hiding: inside the mortgage itself. Opendoor's bet? Replace friction and expense with AI and the loan gets cheaper for the borrower AND more profitable for the lender at the same time. The problem: Opendoor can build an AI-native mortgage from scratch. The other ~5,000 U.S. lenders can't. They run on Encompass, the dominant LOS processing roughly 40% of U.S. originations, and they are never switching off. It holds the loan records, e-folders, investor delivery integrations, and the audit trail regulators require. It costs ~$12K to originate a loan today. Half of that is manual labor. So who does for 5,000 lenders what Opendoor is doing for itself? Balerion AI. (A Pruven Capital portfolio company.) It embeds inside a lender's existing Encompass instance, no rip-and-replace, and underwrites the file with AI agents working in the existing workflows and systems: → Income calc across W-2, self-employed, S-Corp, and rental → Asset review: NSFs, large deposits, undisclosed debts → Guideline compliance against Fannie, Freddie, and non-QM overlays Output: an underwriter-defensible "Path to Close" report with a full audit trail, in seconds. And when a loan fails, it doesn't say "declined." It shows a path to "yes." One live file went from 66% DTI to 39.7% with a single documentation fix. That's fallout converted into fundings. Opendoor is proving AI underwriting makes mortgages cheaper for Opendoor. Balerion makes it true for everyone else. We're actively working with Naren Krishna and Vishal Satish to bring Balerion to more Retail, Correspondent and Wholesale lenders. If you run your lending ops on Encompass, what would you do with underwriting in seconds instead of days?
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Travis Skelly shared thisAI founder's first enterprise deal, in 8 seconds. The hype tastes great. Demos. Pilots. Investor dinners. Then you catch the mirror: there's no real demand for what you built. The eating-your-own-hype era is ending. Enterprise buyers are far more sophisticated than most founders assume. They're building their own proprietary AI stacks, workflows, and apps. Founders, if the market isn't immediately demanding your product, question what you're building. Because the opportunity has never been bigger. AI companies are growing faster than any software generation before them. Make sure you're on the right side of history. Build the hard thing. The thing enterprises need but can't (or shouldn't) build themselves. At Pruven Capital, we help our founders build, sustain, and defend their momentum with the largest incumbents in financial services. P.S. After the USMNT disaster, I'm all in on Haaland and Norway. P.P.S. Yes, this video is an AI face-swap. Even the meme is a wrapper. Ramneek Gupta, Sudip Chakrabarti, Brian Quinn, Jared Moberg, Zsombor Vincze
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Travis Skelly shared thisPace launched a multimodal agent for insurance operations that can run the full unit of work end to end. It can pick up the phone with a broker, read a loss run, reason over operating procedures, navigate policy/admin systems, send the follow-up email, and close the file. That is a meaningful shift for insurance. Most automation has historically been narrow: OCR for docs, RPA for system entry, IVR for calls, workflow tools for routing. Useful, but fragmented. PACE is taking a different approach: • Agent Operating Procedures written in plain English • Specialized subagents for voice, document review, and computer use • Shared context across the entire case • Citations, screen recordings, graders, and test cases for QA and auditability In insurance, the bar is high, “can this be trusted in a regulated, operationally complex environment?” PACE is already putting this product to work with Pruven Capital LPs, including Prudential Financial and WTW, with more to come. This is where enterprise AI gets real: agents that do not replace systems of record, but operate across them to turn fragmented manual work into completed outcomes. Congrats on the launch Jamie Cuffe and team. https://lnkd.in/gMU4aR-nOne agent for the complexity of insurance operationsOne agent for the complexity of insurance operations
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6d
Happy BDay Socure. Cheers Johnny Ayers
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Ramneek Gupta, I’d add two more areas:
1. The emerging wealth stack for minors created by Invest America accounts.
2. Using AI to modernize insurance distribution, including real-time applications and binding, and same-day commissions. Enabling smaller dollar products.
I recently wrote about this:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/travisskelly_wealth-management-just-onboarded-6m-new-clients-activity-7486032119509491712-bZo4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAI-WloBbbAPaOnEYOlFx622DgeCxgZk9iA
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked thisUnbelievable company and very grateful to have made the #IA40 list this year of the top-rated application layer AI businesses in the market. Pinching myself every day that we get to build and show that the world is ready to actually put AI to work, especially being 1 of 2 businesses that represent the largest total services/software spend category in the world (#marketing). Thank you to our customers, investors, and partners for trusting the Gradial team to work with you on your journey to unlock limitless marketing without the limitless token spend :) If you're a marketing leader looking to reduce unnecessary system spend and prepare the rest of your process/stack for an AI-native future, please reach out at anup@gradial.com or sales@gradial.com, we're ready for ya Doug Tallmadge Anish Chadalavada Deip Kumar Vikas Kamran Madrona
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked thisMortgage doesn't need another AI assistant. It needs fewer people hunting for problems. Over the last few months, I've had conversations with lenders ranging from regional IMBs to some of the largest organizations in the country. One thing keeps standing out. Some teams are running hundreds—even thousands—of quality checks on every loan. Many of those checks are still manual. That means highly skilled underwriters spend a surprising amount of time searching for issues before they can do the work they're actually trained to do. The more of these conversations I have, the more I think we've framed the problem backwards. The goal shouldn't be to help underwriters review documents faster. The goal should be to make sure the loan arrives with the right information, the right context, and the right signals before an underwriter ever opens the file. To me, that's the difference between automation and intelligence. Automation speeds up existing work. Intelligence changes what work needs to happen in the first place. Imagine an underwriting process where the file arrives already understood. The information has been reviewed. The inconsistencies have been identified. The areas requiring human judgment are clear. Instead of spending time searching for what might be wrong, underwriters can focus their expertise on the decisions that actually require it. That's where I believe mortgage is headed. Not replacing underwriters. Making their expertise more valuable. What do you think is the biggest bottleneck before underwriting begins today?
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked this🚨 NEW VENMO PREMIERE ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨 In addition to the all-star crew of guests and participants we will have on September 8th, yesterday we announced our special musical guest 🎵 for the Venmo Documentary Red Carpet Premiere: NAPPY ROOTS!!!! There's a special history between iqram magdon-ismail 🪼, Venmo and the band so this feels like the perfect way to blow out the SFJAZZ Center 🤝 See you in 11 days
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked thisFounders: choosing the right investor can be as important as choosing the right co-founder. In the latest Track Record podcast by TRAMLINES, our UK CEO, Emily Turner, speaks to Albert Azis-Clauson 🦚 about why investor fit matters – not just on valuation day, but in the decisions, trade-offs and support that shape the next 5-10 years of your business. The episode also takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture across the UK innovation economy: - where capital is actually moving and how it differs by stage - what’s changing in how founders build and fund companies right now - how AI is reshaping investment, finance and business Track Record by Tramlines – out now. Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts. HSBC Innovation Bank Limited
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked thisIf you missed last week’s episode of The Big Picture, check it out! https://bit.ly/4qs9pRI Rob Chrisman and I spoke with Athan Zhang of Copperlane and Naren Krishna of Balerion AI about mortgage technology, innovation, and the emerging opportunities reshaping how lenders operate. Chrisman CommentaryThe Big Picture - How AI Is Transforming Mortgage Lending From the Ground UpThe Big Picture - How AI Is Transforming Mortgage Lending From the Ground Up
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Travis Skelly liked thisSo proud of what Pruven Capital portfolio company Contabilizei has achieved in the Brazilian Accounting services space. Becoming a verb is the ultimate (like Googling) level of success and being the #1 recommendation by ChatGPT is probably the next closest thing. Congratulations Vitor Torres and the entire Conta team on this achievement.Travis Skelly liked thisA Contabilizei é a contabilidade nº 1 recomendada pelo ChatGPT no Brasil! 🚀 Uma matéria recente publicada pela Fast Company Brasil destacou que a Contabilizei lidera as indicações da inteligência artificial quando o assunto é gestão contábil. Estar no topo desse ranking reforça nossa autoridade, constante inovação e o compromisso diário em simplificar a vida de milhares de empreendedores. A tecnologia evolui, mas nossa missão de simplificar o empreendedorismo no Brasil continua a mesma. Confira a matéria completa! 👇 https://lnkd.in/g-Y-A44g
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Travis Skelly liked thisTravis Skelly liked thisOur family spent a year building a surfboard from pieces of wood from our life - a 1950s Eames chair, a wine barrel from our wedding, and wood from the Minnesota farm where my wife Trae grew up. I've always loved beautiful old surfboards, the 50 and 60 year old ones, and I had a bunch of eBay searches running for them. At some point, I stopped looking for a board to buy and started looking for someone who could help us build one. I found a Dutch surfboard builder named Martijn, about 25 minutes from Pleasure Point. He works only with recycled wood, old chunks of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and blanks the Santa Cruz Guitar Company had set aside. He'd never built a board with a client in the shop before and so I asked if we could be his first. My youngest and I made the drive to his shop 7 or 8 times over the year. Trae came for a few of the sessions. We brought our own wood too, pieces of our life that we wanted in there, and slowly the thing took shape. It came out beautiful, but nothing beats the process. The sawdust, mistakes and do-overs. The board will also probably outlast me, and hopefully my kids will surf on it into their 50s. But the year we spent building it together is now one of my most precious memories, and something I’ll always take with me.
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Paul Hsu
Working with NRF to pursue our patent strategy is an important step in recognizing that proprietary AI systems and workflows are becoming a new form of intellectual property for modern firms. Great to partner with George, John McBride, and the team at Norton Rose Fulbright as we work at the frontier of how AI can transform investment decision-making in venture capital. At Decasonic, we believe the next generation of companies will reinvent with AI workflows and systems how organizations operate, how leaders make decisions, and how teams collaborate with intelligent systems. In going through this streamlined process, it's clear to me that many more startups should clarify their IP strategy. Our internally developed AI platform, RLEN, reflects that philosophy. We are building AI not to automate tasks and flourish outcomes, in collaborative ways for human and AI teammates. This enables our investors to test ideas, explore alternative perspectives, and reach deeper insights faster when navigating uncertainty. More broadly, we are seeing trailblazing work across industries and cities as leaders experiment with how AI can reshape communities, companies, and countries. Leadership with AI forever transforms. We are still in the early innings. Appreciate the partnership and collaboration from the Norton Rose Fulbright team as we continue inventing and innovating. Special shoutout to my colleague Abdul Al Ali who's listed as a co-inventor.
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