photon / noun / >
        the fastest thing in the universe

About the Company

Photon Commerce’s financial AI platform empowers fintech leaders to instantly process B2B payments, invoices, statements, contracts, and any other document and super-human speed and accuracy. Photon's intelligent platform understands and harmonizes data, down to even line-item purchase analytics and prediction.

Over 120 fintech, eCommerce, and logistics companies use this data technology to deeply understand and engage with their customers. Photon has processed over $23 billion in payments, invoices, and receipts data with its customers and partners.

Its global headquarters is in the San Francisco Financial District, blocks away from Visa, Stripe, Square, Brex, Plaid, Coinbase, Affirm, Chime, Flexport, and many other unicorns. It also has offices in Europe and Asia.

​Photon is supported by Village Global, a venture firm funded by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other leaders of industry, the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, and other leading Silicon Valley and global venture capital firms.


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 Team

Michael Young Founder & CEO Michael co-founded Silicon Valley ventures Smart Focus and Innova Dynamics, which was acquired by a major supplier to Apple . Previous customers included Google AI, Apple, Samsung , and the US De

Michael Young
Founder & CEO

Michael co-founded Silicon Valley ventures Smart Focus and Innova Dynamics, which was acquired by a major supplier to Apple. Previous customers included Google AI, Apple, Samsung, and the US Department of Defense.

He and his work have been featured in Bloomberg, Forbes, Economist, and the UN. Michael studied engineering, physics, AI, and business at Stanford and UPenn.

Joe Fox Chief Product Officer Joe was CPO of AvidXchange , CEO of Vroozi, Chief Strategy Officer of BirchStreet Systems, SVP of BD and Product Strategy at SAP Ariba , and a consultant at Accenture. Joe is a subject matter

Joe Fox
Chief Product Officer

Joe was CPO of AvidXchange, CEO of Vroozi, Chief Strategy Officer of BirchStreet Systems, SVP of BD and Product Strategy at SAP Ariba, and a consultant at Accenture.

Joe is a subject matter expert in payments, Procure-to-Pay B2B cloud software, AP automation, and B2B networks.

Chris Robinson Solutions Architect Chris was a Senior Enterprise Sales Engineer at Visa and Array , helping them grow from startup to unicorn status. He was an accounting Subject Matter Expert, Manager, and Senior Sales Engineer

Chris Robinson
Solutions Architect

Chris was a Senior Enterprise Sales Engineer at Visa and Array, helping them grow from startup to unicorn status. He was an accounting Subject Matter Expert, Manager, and Senior Sales Engineer at Webgility, an accounting automation company for eCommerce.

A QuickBooks ProAdvisor, Chris holds a BS in Business Administration and is fluent in JavaScript, C#, PHP, and SQL.

Steve Wasserman Technology Architect Steve co-founded a successful fintech venture acquired by PayPal for over $300M, called IPP, which provided bill pay solutions for the unbanked and underbanked. Steve is founding CEO of Vment

Steve Wasserman
Technology Architect

Steve co-founded a successful fintech venture acquired by PayPal for over $300M, called IPP, which provided bill pay solutions for the unbanked and underbanked. Steve is founding CEO of Vments. He is a Board Advisor to the US Faster Payments Council, and member of the FedNow Community , and the Federal Reserve's Business Payments Coalition.

Steve holds an MBA and engineering degrees, and is a subject matter expert in faster payments, bill pay, ERPs, and financial infrastructure.

Taylor McClenny Head of Data Taylor was Founder & CEO of LeaderBoard and Co-Founder & General Manager of ParasitX, and Co-Founder & COO of Captains' Educational Enrichment Fund. He built neural network architectures inspi

Taylor McClenny
Head of Data

Taylor was Founder & CEO of LeaderBoard and Co-Founder & General Manager of ParasitX, and Co-Founder & COO of Captains' Educational Enrichment Fund. He built neural network architectures inspired by the human cortex and visual perception (Photon Reception Layers).

Taylor studied business and physics at Christopher Newport University.

Grace Zarzecki Partnerships Grace brings customer acquisition experience from Total Quality Logistics (TQL), the second largest freight brokerage in the USA. Grace co-launched her own company, Sharper Edge Hockey, in Chicago. She

Grace Zarzecki
Partnerships

Grace brings customer acquisition experience from Total Quality Logistics (TQL), the second largest freight brokerage in the USA. Grace co-launched her own company, Sharper Edge Hockey, in Chicago. She has been in professional sports commercials and has driven projects alongside Esperanza Spalding and Vijay Iyer of the Harvard Music Department.

Grace graduated from Harvard with a BA in Government.

Nirali Shah Head of Engineering Nirali leads data science and engineering at Photon. She is a subject matter expert in software engineering, data science, and machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She brings experience from

Nirali Shah
Head of Engineering

Nirali leads data science and engineering at Photon. She is a subject matter expert in software engineering, data science, and machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She brings experience from Trinnacle Capital Management performing time series modeling of payments and credit card data.

She has a Masters of Science in Data Science from Columbia University.

Joe Proto Advisor Joe is a serial entrepreneur having founded 3 payments companies: Transactis (acquired by Mastercard ), REMITCO (acquired by First Data / Fiserv ), and CashFlex (acquired by CoreStates, now part of Wells Fargo

Joe Proto
Advisor

Joe is a serial entrepreneur having founded 3 payments companies: Transactis (acquired by Mastercard), REMITCO (acquired by First Data / Fiserv), and CashFlex (acquired by CoreStates, now part of Wells Fargo). Transactis served 25 of the 50 largest banks.

Joe serves on the NACHA advisory council, and is a board director at LendKey, Azimuth GRC, ActiveWorx. He co-founded Windham Ventures and is an LP at other leading venture capital firms.

Rob Eldridge Advisor Rob was VP of Product Management - Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and CFO of Amazon Asia and Emerging Markets . He was responsible for products used by FBA Sellers, including: Shipment Creation, Inbound Workf

Rob Eldridge
Advisor

Rob was VP of Product Management - Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and CFO of Amazon Asia and Emerging Markets. He was responsible for products used by FBA Sellers, including: Shipment Creation, Inbound Workflows, Inventory Management, Returns and Dispositions, and User Experience/Design.

Rob holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and a BS in Chemistry from the University of Washington.

William Rickman Advisor William is Director of Commercialization and Sales at Visa , where he is responsible for Token ID. He was Director of Integrated Payments at Paya, and spearheaded sales at Sift, Worldpay, Bank of Ameri

William Rickman
Advisor

William is Director of Commercialization and Sales at Visa, where he is responsible for Token ID.

He was Director of Integrated Payments at Paya, and spearheaded sales at Sift, Worldpay, Bank of America Merchant Services, Bill.com, and Vantiv. He was an early employee and Director at Bill.com prior to its IPO. He is a thought leader in payments, commerce solutions, SaaS, and machine learning for financial services.

Audrey Blackmon Advisor Audrey is a fintech and payments industry leader from Vantiv, First Data, Worldpay, Verrency . She serves on the board of Wnet, and Money20/20 RiseUp. Audrey provides strategic coaching, mentoring, and

Audrey Blackmon
Advisor

Audrey is a fintech and payments industry leader from Vantiv, First Data, Worldpay, Verrency. She serves on the board of Wnet, and Money20/20 RiseUp.

Audrey provides strategic coaching, mentoring, and consulting to corporates for payments.

TRACK RECORD

$57M

Raised in VC funds for our previously founded companies

27

Patents in payments, AI, invoicing, supply chain, and advanced technologies

$6M

Advanced R&D contracts, successfully commercialized

"A quantum leap in payments and transaction artificial intelligence"

The meaning of Photon Commerce comes from the photon, a particle of light, being the fastest thing in the universe, by law. Our vision is to harness digital transformation and computer vision to enable modern fintech and eCommerce businesses to collaborate around supply & demand data, share intelligence, and achieve visibility at the speed of light.

Computer vision uncovers insights never seen before in the digital supply chain.

The quantum theory of light and electrons defined the human civilization in the 20th century (the atomic bomb, the transistor, the internet, the information age). All commerce is becoming eCommerce. All tech is becoming infused with machine intelligence. We believe the human experience this century will be defined by machine intelligence and vision.

Values

VELOCITY

Delivering speed and direction to eCommerce, distribution, and manufacturing leaders to stay ahead of the curve

VISIBILITY

Unbridled intelligence, communication, data analytics, and power to distributors, suppliers, and customers

VISION

Document understanding, thanks to breakthrough computer vision and natural language processing trained on the largest industrial datasets

Our inspiration

Responsible for over millions of dollars a day in shipments for leading eCommerce companies, we found ourselves spending an unreasonable amount of time resolving invoice-PO-packing list discrepancies and exceptions manually.


While many have tried to solve this with EDIs and sweeping the rest of the problem under the carpet, we set out to design the ultimate vision system to deliver unprecedented efficiency.

​
​We meticulously forged the final framework that recognizes the realities of your world still ruled by paperwork, PDFs, errors, and legacy ERP systems. We optimized to that reality with unparalleled computer vision, exception handling, and digital transformation.