Brings an extraordinary skill set to Galileo’s API-based payments platform for card issuing and digital banking.

Galileo welcomes Venmo and Braintree alumnus Amit Jhawar as a special advisor. Galileo CEO Clay Wilkes said, “In his role as an advisor, Amit will help Galileo scale our business and optimize our performance to maximize potential. His expertise in growing API-based businesses like Braintree and building a category-defining consumer fintech brand in Venmo will support Galileo to achieve new heights of success. I’ve gotten to know Amit over the last many months, and he brings an extraordinary skill set to Galileo.”

Jhawar said, “Galileo’s unique trajectory, bootstrapping itself for years before taking funding and then quickly pivoting to a partnership with consumer powerhouse SoFi, is really intriguing. I look forward to working with Clay and his team to help Galileo continue to scale.”

Jhawar recently joined Accel as a venture partner, advising Accel’s portfolio companies and helping make new investments. He spent the previous nine years building and scaling two fintech businesses from their earliest days: Braintree and Venmo. Amit was COO and CFO at Braintree, where he joined with the Series A investment as the 29th team member. In that role, he led the acquisition of Venmo in 2012 and helped drive the sale of Braintree and Venmo to PayPal for $800MM in 2013.

Amit continued with PayPal, where he led the business functions of the Braintree business to achieve nearly 1000x growth. Most recently, Amit was GM of Venmo; he and his team grew the company from 15,000 active users in 2012 to over 52 million today.

Accel partner John Locke said, “We’ve been fortunate that Amit has applied all his experience to informally mentoring a number of Accel founders of late, so we’re thrilled to have him working with us full-time. His expertise in API-based businesses and all things payments-related is unparalleled. Galileo is scaling fast, and Amit’s skills will be extremely useful to the team.” Amit holds a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School, both with honors. He also has worked at McKinsey, Bain Capital and KKR.

Learn more about Galileo, the global payments processing platform that powers world-leading fintechs, challenger banks, neobanks, financial services and investment firms by removing the complexity from payments.