Michael Rangel founded Novo, a business banking platform for freelancers, sole proprietors, and small companies, and ran it as chief executive for nearly a decade. In April 2025 he stepped back from the CEO role and became Founder and Board Member, staying close to the company he started in 2016.
From the Trading Floor to Small Business
His first career was in the plumbing of finance. He worked in operations at Smith Barney and then spent more than five years in trade administration and operations at Fairholme Capital Management, the Miami investment firm. It was back-office work, close to the mechanics of how money moves between institutions.
He later explained the bank economics that bothered him. A bank, he has said, spends almost the same effort onboarding and monitoring a business that earns $1,000 a year as one that earns $1 million. Compliance checks, fraud review, and customer service all cost money no matter how small the account, so the smallest businesses were the least attractive customers to serve.
Building Novo
He started Novo with co-founder Tyler McIntyre to change that math with software. The product combined free business checking with invoicing, payments, and links to tools such as QuickBooks, Stripe, and Shopify, with deposits held at Middlesex Federal Savings. Investors backed the idea: a January 2022 round valued the company at $700 million, and a credit facility the next year funded Novo Funding, a working-capital product for its customers.
Novo later moved its base to Miami, the city where Rangel had built his first career, and grew to serve more than 250,000 independent businesses.
A Second Act With AI
Since stepping back from day-to-day leadership, he has spoken about what artificial intelligence means for the problem he set out to solve. In a 2026 interview, he described compliance specialists handling ten times their old volume with AI help, and customer service teams letting software answer routine questions so people can focus on judgment calls.
He is careful about the hype. AI will not put a business on autopilot, he says, but it can give a one-person company some of the finance help that only large firms used to afford. That is the same promise he made when he started Novo: a bank account that works as well for the smallest business as for the biggest.
