Alex Mifsud is the co-founder and chief executive of Weavr, the London, England, company that lets business software makers add accounts, cards and payments to their own products. He is a Maltese engineer with a PhD in computer science who helped invent the virtual prepaid card in the early 2000s and has now built three payments companies, each one aimed at letting software handle money more safely.
An Engineer From Malta
"I'm basically an engineer who loves building stuff. In fact, I can't stop building stuff," he has said. He studied computer engineering at the University of Malta, where his undergraduate project was a complete microprocessor he designed and built from scratch using bit-slice chips. His first job was building a digital mapping service for the Maltese government. He then earned a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, with a thesis on an algebra of interacting agents, a subject that looks prescient now that AI agents are starting to make payments.
As he finished his doctorate he co-founded the Malta Internet Foundation, a non-profit that still manages the .mt internet domain and ran the country's national internet exchange in the 1990s. Much later, in 2018, he co-founded another non-profit, the London Blockchain Foundation.
Inventing the Virtual Card at Entropay
He describes his move into finance as an accident. His first business idea was about making the internet safer, which led him to safer ways to pay online. After a couple of years of work, his company Entropay launched what it calls the world's first virtual prepaid card in 2003. He thinks of it as a tweak on the credit card that removed the plastic, the bank account requirement and the credit. "One is my own little part in inventing virtual cards," he has said of what he is proudest of.
Ixaris and the Travel Industry
His second company, Ixaris, built payment tools for large businesses, especially in travel, where virtual cards are used to pay hotels and airlines. Its big win was distribution, through deals with the travel booking systems Amadeus and Sabre, and the platform went on to process billions of dollars. Running Ixaris also showed him its limits. Each multinational client needed a custom project, and he realised that the clients themselves were better placed to design their ideal payment flows if someone gave them easy enough tools. With funding from the EU's Horizon 2020 research programme, Ixaris built an experimental stack called the Open Payments Cloud, which he later spun out. That code became the start of Weavr.
Founding Weavr
He founded Weavr in 2018 with Adrian Mizzi. Its customers are business software companies in HR, expense management, accounting, travel and procurement, and they use Weavr to offer accounts and cards inside their apps without becoming regulated firms themselves. Weavr raised a $40 million Series A in February 2022 led by Tiger Global, bringing its total to about $55 million. In his early years as chief executive he focused on building the infrastructure, and today he spends most of his time on sales and on explaining embedded finance to software businesses. "Practice drives new insights that lead to further innovation," he has said.
Weavr also created a modelling language called FinML that describes how financial structures fit together, so questions about regulation, security and compliance can be answered in a structured way. He now argues that AI agents will be the next big users of payments, and that for any software company wiring an agent to a payments API, the connection is about 5% of the work. The other 95%, in his view, is being able to prove the customer approved a payment once a dispute arrives, so companies should design for the dispute first and build the integration second.
The doctoral student who wrote about how interacting agents behave now spends his days on payment rails for software agents that spend money. Three companies on, the subject of his thesis has come back to find him, and so has the habit he admits he cannot break: building stuff.
