The Rise of Dimitri Dadiomov, Modern Treasury Co-Founder
Dimitri Dadiomov left a fintech giant to create Modern Treasury and is now among the Bay Area’s top fintech entrepreneurs, reshaping how money moves.
Dimitri Dadiomov co-founded Modern Treasury in 2018 alongside Matt Marcus and Sam Aarons. Dimitri and his co-founders met at Kiavi (formerly LendingHome), where the trio was responsible for building and scaling the fintech’s payment operations platform.
While at Kaivi, Dimitri Dadimov and his co-founders realized that there is a massive need for modern, scalable payment infrastructure to save thousands of companies whose dated payment systems hindered their ability to support and connect with their clients, users, and employees.
Modern Treasury builds payment operations solutions to automate the full circulation of finances and help businesses implement real-time payments.
Modern Treasury is accessible through a web application or API.
In March 2022, Modern Treasury completed its second Series C deal, which saw the company raise $135M after a post-evaluation value of $2B. By the end of 2022, Modern Treasury would reconcile more than $2 billion in payments monthly, an increase from $1 billion in April 2021.
Modern Treasury has a client roster that is full of fast-growing companies, such as Marqeta, Side, and Gusto, all of which are based in the Bay Area. Modern Treasury is poised for global growth after Plaid recently listed the company as one of its 50 global partners to help operationalize Plaid’s recently created payment ecosystems.
But things did not just happen magically for Dimitri and his Co-Founders at Modern Treasury. They had to do a lot of research to understand the problem of moving money between businesses and between businesses and customers.
More than $750 trillion moves across the bank rails every year. However, despite this huge volume of money, the technology powering these transactions has not kept pace with the digital advancements across other sectors.
With the significance and scale of this opportunity in Mind, Dimitri and his cofounders teamed up to create Modern Treasury in 2018.
Dimitri Dadiomov, together with his two co-founders, Sam Aarons and Matt Marcus, joined LendingHome in June 2015, and the trio became friends. Dimitri was the product manager for the team. Dimitri and his friends, now co-founders, worked with a fintech system to move money onto LendingHome.
The idea for Modern Treasury came to Dimitry and his co-founders when the team was tasked with launching a ‘retail investment platform’ created by LendingHome. The platform enabled clients to invest in a renovation project through someone buying a property, or an individual doing a fix-and-flip.
Dimitry and his partners realized that for every loan given out, there is only one payment, but when the owners of a loan become more, every monthly payment received has to be divided among the investors of that loan.
Between 2017 and 2018, Dimitri and his co founders started spending a lot of time with tech companies located in the Bay Area that had a similar problem of moving money with ease due to the lack of proper fintech infrastructure.
Companies including Airbnb, Uber, AngelList, and Gusto experienced the same challenge, according to Dimitri. That is when he realized that a proper system needed to be developed to ease the movement of money and facilitate faster transactions.
Dimitri Shares Some of the lessons he learned before creating the Modern Treasury.
While spending time studying the systems and operation models of various tech companies, Dimitri says he learned that there are numerous problems around engineering integration, the reporting and closing of books by the finance teams, and other infrastructural challenges.
Dimitri then realized that almost every tech company he studied had a small internal team that existed to manage these problems, and they were often referred to by names like the money team, or the payments team.
Dimitri and his co-founders had a series of meetings with these crisis management teams and informally created rapport over the same challenges in a lot of cases.
It is through these lessons that Dimitri Dadiomov and his co-founders managed to build Modern Treasury, a ready-to-go payment operations platform to enable the ease of payments and transactions between businesses and clients and business to business.
So, how did Modern Treasury increase its workforce in 2020 despite the ravaging COVID-19?
Modern Treasury quadrupled its workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time when companies were downsizing. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Modern Treasury had only 12 employees, but by 2022, the company had 81 employees. Dimitri shares that the growth at Modern Treasury was possible because they embraced remote working during the pandemic since everybody was able to work via Zoom.
A secret that Dimitri shares that has enabled their company’s growth is the continued engagement of Modern Treasury’s customers and investors. Modern Treasury introduced Zoom Happy Hours, where the clients, employees, and investors of Modern Treasury enjoyed coffee breaks and chatted on various issues and topics.
Dimitri Dadiomov’s unique Leadership Style
Dimitri says that he leads by encouraging a high context environment where every employee is encouraged to make their own decisions that are beneficial to the company. Dimitri says he believes that, as a startup- Modern Treasury has to ‘go slow to go fast’. One of the ways to go slow was to maintain a close-knit team for a long time and focus on fully satisfying their early customers and their product quality. For Dimitri, having a focused team with a high degree of context is the best way to approach operations as a start-up.
In his interview with Bizjournals, shared his Expansion Plans for Modern Treasury
Dimitri and his co-founders have plans to expand Modern Treasury and make it a global franchise. Modern Treasury successfully opened its new San Francisco headquarters in 2021 and, later, a New York office in Manhattan by the end of 2022. Having the new Modern Treasury near Union Square was a smart move by Dimitry and his team since the office acts as their town square. Hence, the new San Francisco headquarters positions Modern Treasury for global growth by being situated at the heart of the tech industry.
https://www.moderntreasury.com/about
https://medium.com/wharton-fin....
https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2022/01/07/dimitri-dadiomov-executive-profile.html
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