By Gilgamesh Ventures and the Wharton School of Business

Everyone knows about the PayPal Mafia. Beyond changing how money moves, in the last two decades PayPal has propelled several cohorts of revolutionaries that have reshaped how finance works, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and others. But is PayPal the sole example? 

It’s been my suspicion for some time that it’s not.  So in the last few months, in partnership with The Wharton School of Business represented by professor Dave Erickson, Miguel Armaza and I set out to explore further whether other launchpads of entrepreneurship exist elsewhere in fintech. With the help of three extraordinary Wharton MBAs – Kirstie Irmana, Kris Jenk, and Josh Jagota – we found that others indeed exist, and several findings are deeply consequential.  Let’s explore those below. 

What We Did

To begin answering our question, we sought to identify the biggest, most influential fintech companies in both North and South America.  Starting with hundreds of contenders, we narrowed our list to fifteen companies based on a variety of factors.  For simplicity, we’ve dubbed these fifteen the “Fintech Families.”  The impact of these fifteen companies is simply unparalleled, having spawned close to 2,600 founders in the Americas, with ~12% (298) of those founders having founded fintech companies across the US and Latin America.

In addition to their operating scale and financial success, these companies have played a sometimes hidden yet foundational role in defining the future of fintech, via their alumni.  But that’s not our only finding. The results of our research underline resilience and growing momentum throughout these networks of companies and founders. In recent years, a strengthening wave of startups has emerged from the Fintech Families, with over a third of the top startups in our analysis receiving funding in the last two years alone. In fact, 2023 produced the highest number of fintech founders from this subset across any individual year (27% of the entire subset, to be exact), signaling that entrepreneurs aren’t hesitating to jump into emerging verticals in the space. 

Below are the fifteen Fintech Families we identified, along with some accompanying statistics: