Chris Dean is co-founder and chief executive of Treasury Prime, the San Francisco, California, company whose software connects banks with the fintechs and software firms that want to offer accounts and payments. A Caltech physicist who began in machine learning at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he had sold a company and considered himself retired when a friend talked him into banking software in 2014.
Machine Learning at JPL
He studied physics at the California Institute of Technology. While he was deciding about graduate school, his adviser, who was running the lab, suggested he take a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and from 1994 to 1996 he was on the technical staff of its Machine Learning Systems Group. One early customer for the modelling work was Capital One, which wanted to know whom to send card offers. A University of Michigan co-branded card was a good idea, he recalls; there are a lot of Michigan alumni. A Caltech card would be terrible, because there are hardly any Caltech people. He loved that the test of the work was whether someone used it.
A Start-up With Security Guards
He and his wife moved to San Francisco to look after her parents, and he took a job at a start-up without, as he puts it, knowing what the word meant. It was chaos. People threw chairs across the room, court orders barred some of them from the building, and security guards stood at the door. He liked everything that was not the drama, and went looking for a better-run start-up to learn from. With people he met there he founded or co-founded several software companies, including Merced Systems, the consulting firm Kyluka and the health plan company Benefitter, and he sold one of them for a good sum.
A Day of Coffee With Dan Kimerling
In 2014 his friend Dan Kimerling called for help with the technology at his nine-month-old start-up, Standard Treasury, an API-first banking company meant to help the largest US banks serve fintech clients. "Dan, I love you, but no way. I'm retired," Dean told him. Kimerling asked only for coffee. They spent the whole day at the coffee shop, and Dean came out as chief technology officer. Within a year Silicon Valley Bank bought the company, and he became its chief technology officer for API banking, where he saw how badly US banking infrastructure was struggling to modernise.
Founding Treasury Prime
In 2017 he and Jim Brusstar left SVB to found Treasury Prime, and the company went through Y Combinator in early 2018. Its software lets a bank open accounts and move money for fintech partners through an API, and gives those partners a network of banks to work with. Kimerling's firm, Deciens Capital, became an investor, and Kimerling joined the board. By the February 2023 Series C the company had grown revenue nearly 400% since its Series B.
He took the Standard Treasury job only because a friend kept him at a coffee shop all day. More than a decade later the retiree who said no way runs the company that grew out of that conversation, and he still judges the work the way he learned to at JPL: by whether anyone uses it.
