David Dindi co-founded Atomic Invest, a New York company that lets fintechs, banks, and consumer brands offer investing inside their own apps, and leads it as chief executive. His route there ran from Kenya through Europe to Silicon Valley.
Kenya, Vienna, Stanford
He was born in Kenya, where his father lectured at the University of Nairobi. When he was about six, his father took a job with the United Nations and the family moved to Austria. He finished the International Baccalaureate at the Vienna International School and then crossed the Atlantic to study chemical engineering and computer science at Stanford University.
At Stanford he worked on AI research at the School of Medicine, including drug safety analysis and deep learning for language. He co-founded Clariful Health in 2016 to help health systems use AI on patient records, and he worked as a quantitative analyst at Makena Capital Management, an endowment-style investment firm.
The Compounding Problem
Working inside institutional investing showed him a gap. Sophisticated tools for building portfolios existed, but most people were shut out by high costs and complex platforms. On the QED Investors podcast he has spoken about the power of compounding and about making ownership possible for people who never had access to it.
In 2020 he started Atomic with Marco Alban-Hidalgo and Emma Marriott, and the company went through Y Combinator. Their bet was that most companies should not have to build a brokerage to offer investing. Atomic would hold the registrations and run the infrastructure, and partners would keep the customer relationship.
Scaling an Embedded Model
The model took hold with partners such as NerdWallet, Yieldstreet, and Bluevine. In August 2025 Atomic raised $30 million to expand internationally, after end-investor accounts grew 52 times in a year and annualized trading volume passed $20 billion.
He describes the goal in the same terms he used at the start: a future where everyone can harness compounding. The engineer who once modeled drug safety now spends his time on a different kind of system, one meant to put long-term investing in front of people through the apps they already use.
