Jeremy Almond is the co-founder and chief executive of Paystand, a business payments network in Scotts Valley, California, that helps companies collect invoices without paper checks or card fees. He started it with Scott Campbell.
A Crisis at Home
In 2008 Almond was living in New York and working in technology roles when the financial crisis hit, and his family lost its home. He has described it as a catalyst that shook his trust in the economy and the banking system.
He went back to graduate school and wrote his thesis on how commercial banking could be better and how digital transformation would get it there. Having lived through both the dot-com bust of 2001 and the 2008 crash, he said later, left him prepared for hard times as a founder.
Venmo for Business
Paystand grew out of that thesis. He saw that individuals could send money easily through apps, while a business sending a $100,000 invoice still faced paper checks or card fees of 2 to 3 percent, which he called untenable at that size. Nearly half of enterprise payments still involved a check.
His answer was a bank network for business payments, built on cloud software and blockchain technology, with a flat subscription in place of per-transaction fees. He likes to say that money has become software, yet revenue is the one part of a business not in the cloud. NewView Capital led a $50 million round in 2021.
Building the Network
Growth since then has come through scale. In 2024 Paystand bought Teampay, a New York purchasing software company, adding its network of 250,000 companies to Paystand’s roughly 800,000 and pushing the combined network past one million. In 2026 it introduced USDb, a digital dollar for business payments.
Almond still frames the work as a mission, not just a market. The banking system that failed his family is the one he is trying to route around, and the network he keeps expanding is his version of a fairer alternative.
