Vijay Oddiraju is co-founder and chief executive of Volante Technologies, which runs wire, real-time and cross-border payment processing for banks. He started the company in 2001 with Uday Thakur and Venkat Malla, at about the worst moment possible.
From India to Oracle
He was born and raised in India, where he studied engineering, then moved to the United States for a master's in computer science. He spent about six years at Oracle, in mission-critical support, the Oracle kernel group, engineering and consulting. Then he caught the entrepreneurial bug.
GlueBeans and NextSet
In 1995 he co-founded GlueBeans, a standards-based middleware company. It merged with NextSet Software, where he became chief strategy officer.
Starting After 9/11
Volante launched in 2001, after 9/11 and the dot-com crash, and still signed some of the world's largest financial companies as customers. It later moved into payments when it saw customers using its low-code platform to process them. The first real-time payment in US history went through its platform. More than 150 customers now use it, including four of the top five global corporate banks and seven of the top ten US banks.
Backed by Its Customers
Volante has raised $116 million in outside investment, including a $66 million round led by Sixth Street Growth in November 2023, with Wells Fargo, BNY, Citi, Poste Italiane and Visa joining. Every bank that invests is also a customer. After Fedwire moved to ISO 20022 in July 2025, Volante's customers processed more than $1.4 trillion a day, about 30% of Fedwire's value. In June 2026 it added agentic AI to the platform.
Trust and Space
On the Leaders in Payments podcast in 2021 he described his passion for building a company culture based on trust. Outside work his passion is space, and he hopes one day to hitch a ride beyond the atmosphere.
He started a software company in the wreckage of 2001. A quarter of a century later, a large share of America's wire payments runs through it.
