Javon Jones

Salus is a B2B SaaS platform that helps community credit unions (like Metro Credit Union) instantly underwrite and disburse $50–$400 microloans using members' transaction data — with no credit bureau check — reducing loan processing costs by over 75% and cutting member charge-off rates from 27% to 3%.

Salus is led by two founders whose backgrounds directly complement each other: James Chemplavil brings 16 years of institutional credit-risk expertise from Barings, while Ryan Barrett built the ML-driven underwriting engine behind Acima Credit's $1.7B acquisition by Rent-A-Center in 2021. The team is rounded out by Mark Miyamoto, a VP of Sales with a decade of fintech sales experience selling into credit unions and FIs. The founders do not appear to have worked together prior to Salus.

James Chemplavil

Founder & CEO

Founder and CEO of Salus (March 2021–present). Spent 16 years at global asset manager Barings, rising to Director and personally originating and monitoring multi-billion-dollar leveraged-loan portfolios — over $10B in high-risk corporate debt underwritten. Origin story is concrete: he founded Salus after a preschool teacher at his son's daycare couldn't obtain a $500 loan. He pivoted Salus from fintech-only clients to credit unions when he recognized CUs already held the member data needed for automated underwriting — a move that has produced 15,000+ micro-loans totaling ~$3M, cutting charge-offs from 27% to 3% and saving borrowers over $2M versus payday alternatives. Board member at Classroom Central; speaker at CCUA Fintech Connect.

Sources

Ryan Barrett

Co-Founder & CTO

Co-Founder and CTO of Salus (November 2022–present). Spent seven years at Acima Credit, progressing from Director of Data Science to VP of Data Science and Credit Risk, where he built the ML-driven underwriting system for over $5B in subprime consumer leases — a platform that became a key asset in Acima's $1.7B acquisition by Rent-A-Center in 2021. M.S. Statistics, University of Utah. Advisory board member at DataRobot and Equifax; recurring LEND360 speaker on ML in consumer finance. Briefly served as Head of Underwriting at Bureau, a fraud and identity intelligence platform.

Sources

Mark Miyamoto, MBA

Vice President of Sales

VP of Sales at Salus (May 2026–present). EMBA, Penn State University (2016–2018). Previously Senior Account Executive at equipifi and Founding Account Executive at Senso. A decade of fintech sales experience selling into credit unions and financial institutions.

Sources

As of June 30, 2026, Salus has a total headcount of 5. Over the past 90 days, headcount increased by 1 employee (from 4 on April 3, 2026). This followed growth after the $1.45M Seed round on October 25, 2023, when headcount expanded from 1 to 4 by July 10, 2024. Current mix: 3 Operations, 1 Engineering, 1 Sales, 1 Advisor.

Salus's early credit union partners include Metro Credit Union, GFA Federal Credit Union, and Southern Chautauqua Federal Credit Union. Delivered as a multi-tenant B2B SaaS application accessible via web dashboard and RESTful APIs integrated into credit union channels; middleware partner Janusea provides connectivity to CU core processors.

• •Salus appoints fintech veteran Mark Miyamoto as Vice President of Sales to scale go-to-market operations.
  AR Daily Digest
• •Salus partners with Metro Credit Union to launch an automated small-dollar lending program.
  Finopotamus
• •GFA Federal Credit Union deploys Salus's automated microloan platform to strengthen member impact.
  CUInsight
• •Southern Chautauqua Federal Credit Union collaborates with Salus to deploy the Sentinel data analytics platform.
  Fintech Futures
• •Salus partners with core-connectivity provider Janusea to remove barriers in real-time microlending.
  Janusea
• •Salus raises $1.45M in Seed funding to expand its automated digital underwriting platform.
• •Salus receives a $274,541 grant from the National Science Foundation.

• •Credit unions increasingly adopt cash-flow underwriting to evaluate underserved demographics using real-time transaction data.
  America's Credit Unions
• •Adoption of automated, AI-powered decision engines rises among credit unions to lower underwriting costs and enable instant approvals.
  EAS Corp
• •CFPB issues advisory opinion clarifying that certain nonrecourse Earned Wage Access programs are not 'credit' under TILA.
  Morrison Foerster
• •House Financial Services Committee advances federal Earned Wage Access legislation to establish national regulations.
  Consumer Finance Monitor
• •NCUA updates AI Resource Hub with guidelines on third-party risk management and explainability for CU AI deployment.
  CCG Catalyst
• •CFPB mandates that lenders using AI/ML algorithms must provide specific, accurate legal reasons for adverse credit actions.
  CFPB
• •TruStage reports moderate credit union loan growth projections due to high interest rates and liquidity constraints.
  TruStage
• •Persistent inflation and cost-of-living pressures drive increased consumer demand for microloans and automated financial stress monitoring.
  Cooperative Credit Union Association

Cyder is a B2B SaaS embedded loyalty platform that helps credit unions (such as Meridian and Conexus) automatically enroll members and issue behavior-based rewards inside their existing banking apps — reducing member churn and increasing product adoption.

Cyder's three-person team is deeply interconnected: co-founders Will Christodoulou and Sukhman Dulay both completed their MSc in Business Analytics at Ivey Business School simultaneously (2018–2019) and overlapped at Scotiabank in fraud/risk analytics in 2018. CTO Brandon Kucera also attended Ivey and worked at Deloitte alongside Dulay (2018–2021). Together, the team pairs a decade of AI/ML consulting in financial-services loyalty (Dulay), data engineering and security architecture (Christodoulou), and senior software engineering at an AI-native SaaS company (Kucera).

Sukhman Dulayin

Co-Founder & CEO

Spent 2+ years at Deloitte's Omnia AI practice as an AI consultant specializing in hyper-personalized loyalty strategy for large Canadian financial institutions, and is a named co-author on Deloitte's 37-page research paper 'Connecting with Meaning — Hyper-personalizing the Customer Experience using Data, Analytics & AI.' Later joined Accenture's Customer Data and Analytics Strategy team in San Francisco (2021–2024), leading multiple FI loyalty transformations. Earlier: analytics & global risk at Scotiabank; National Marketing Manager at Amazon (2016–2018). B.Comm, University of Guelph; MSc in Business Analytics, Ivey. Appeared on Dragons' Den Canada and at Plug & Play Silicon Valley pitching Cyder.

Sources

Will Christodoulouin

Co-Founder & CTO

A decade of data engineering and security experience: fraud analytics at Scotiabank, data management at NGen Canada, senior BI consulting at MNP Digital, and a current Senior PM — Analytics Platform role at Loblaw Digital. BESc in Engineering + MSc in Business Analytics at Ivey (overlapping with both Dulay and Kucera). Accepted into the UC Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator program. Recognized industry speaker (TD Marketing Executive Summit, Plug & Play Tech Summit, Cyber-Security Catalyst) and has testified before Canada's Senate on data ownership. Bootstrapped Cyder's first prototype himself and organized the 2023 IveyHacks hackathon to crowdsource privacy-preserving features for the platform.

Sources

Brandon Kucera

Chief Technology Officer

Joined February 2026. Most recently Senior Software Engineer at Ada CX (2023–2026), a Toronto-based AI-native customer service automation company. Prior: nearly three years as IT Developer at Ubisoft. Began his career at Deloitte (2018–2021) in systems engineering and business technology analysis, where he overlapped with co-founder Sukhman Dulay. Bachelor's from Western University and a second Bachelor's from Ivey Business School — same academic cohort as both Christodoulou and Dulay.

Sources

Cyder's latest total headcount is 13 as of June 27, 2026 — flat growth (0%) over the past 90 days since March 29, 2026. Prior to this plateau the team expanded from 11 (Dec 15, 2025) to 13 (Feb 2, 2026), coinciding with the $2.2M Early Stage round announced Jan 27, 2026. Engineering drove most expansion (4 → 6); Operations declined (4 → 2) from June 23, 2025 to June 27, 2026.

Cyder targets digitally-enabled credit unions with 10k+ members. Its early customer roster spans some of the largest Canadian CUs, and Conexus Venture Capital leading the seed round aligns investor incentives with distribution.

• •Cyder closed a $2.2M Early Stage round in January 2026 led by Conexus Venture Capital.
  Crunchbase
• •Named Brandon Kucera as CTO (Feb 2026) from Ada CX to accelerate platform engineering.
  LinkedIn
• •Announced strategic data-integration partnership with Lodestar Technologies.
  Company announcement

• •Digital Onboarding raises $58M in growth funding to scale customer engagement solutions.
  Finovate
• •Imprint achieves a $1B valuation after $150M Series D for its co-branded card platform.
  PYMNTS
• •Shell introduces everyday spending reward credit card powered by co-branded card platform Imprint.
  PR Newswire
• •Bankjoy expands Q4 2025 presence, adding 10 new FI clients and 13 platform expansion agreements.
  Bankjoy Press

Across is a B2B SaaS platform that helps compliance and risk teams at sponsor banks and credit unions manage their fintech and BaaS partner oversight end-to-end — reducing risk assessment drafting time by 60% while producing audit-ready, examiner-formatted reports.

Across is co-founded by Ashish Shrestha (CEO) and Gaurav Raj Shrestha (Co-Founder), who previously built Machnet together — a Payment-as-a-Service API company that reached a $1.7M seed round and near-$1M projected ARR before pivoting. Both founders spent years on opposite sides of the bank–fintech due diligence problem: Ashish securing sponsor-bank relationships, Gaurav designing AML/compliance programs.

Ashish Shresthain

Co-Founder / CEO

Co-Founder and CEO of Across, concurrently President of Machnet and CEO of MachPay Services Inc. Previously co-founded Machnet, a payments infrastructure API company, leading it from zero to a $1.7M seed raise and near-$1M projected ARR, and earlier launched MoneyToNepal.com. His career spans 15+ years in payments licensing, sponsor-bank relationship management, and AML/KYC policy — the precise friction points Across automates. He has publicly brought on notable advisors including Shamir Karkal (co-founder of Simple, founder of Sila Money).

Sources

Gaurav Raj Shresthain

Co-Founder

Co-Founder of Across and concurrently Co-Founder & COO of Machnet. Chartered Accountant and Certified Transaction Monitoring Associate (CTMA) with 10+ years spanning internal audit at NIC Asia Bank, consulting at Ernst & Young, and finance/compliance ops at Machnet (2015–2023). At Machnet he built AML program infrastructure and finance operations as the company scaled to its seed round — the firsthand experience of capital burn and compliance friction that directly motivated founding Across.

Sources

As of July 7, 2026, Across has a total headcount of 37 employees — 8.82% growth in the past 90 days (up from 34 on April 7, 2026). Earlier scaling coincided with the $1.7M pre-seed round on June 1, 2025, during which headcount grew from 24 (Feb 6, 2025) to 34 (July 7, 2025). Recent expansion is primarily driven by Operations (+7.25% to 25 in the past 90 days); the People team held flat at 12. Engineering data last updated June 29, 2025 at 9.

Across's design partners are sponsor banks and credit unions with active BaaS/fintech partner programs. The platform is delivered as multi-tenant B2B SaaS with API endpoints for automated data ingestion into bank workflows.

• •Across secured $1.7M in pre-seed funding in June 2025 to accelerate its TPRM platform for banks and fintechs.
  Company blog
• •Across completed SOC 2 Type I examination in December 2025, validating information security controls as it works toward a Type II audit.
  Company announcement
• •Oversight-AI platform update: 60% reduction in risk assessment drafting time via automated collection + AI-driven scoring.
  Product release notes

• •Regulators emphasize continuous oversight of bank–fintech partnerships, not point-in-time reviews.
  FDIC
• •Industry guidelines highlight Explainable AI (XAI) as a necessity for financial institutions to maintain transparency and generate audit-ready regulatory reports.
  FSSCC
• •Global Banking-as-a-Service platform market projected to reach $386.1B by 2036 despite regulatory headwinds.
  Future Market Insights