Sal Rehmetullah, co-founder of Stax Payments, is aiming to build another major FinTech company with his latest venture, Worth AI. After helping Stax reach a $1 billion valuation and securing Series D funding, Rehmetullah left the company to take time off but soon felt compelled to return to entrepreneurship.
“I was in ‘soul searching’ mode,” Rehmetullah told Hypepotamus. He reflected on his previous experience and questioned how he could address unresolved challenges from building Stax. “Stax was a great $1 billion story,” Rehmetullah told Hypepotamus. “Why wasn’t it $10 billion?”
These questions led him to launch Worth AI alongside his sister and co-CEO Suneera Madhani. The new company offers an AI-powered credit-underwriting platform targeting FinTechs, financial institutions, credit unions, independent software vendors, payment processors, and lenders serving small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The platform aims to speed up approvals, enhance compliance processes, and improve risk management by automating onboarding and underwriting workflows.
A key feature of Worth AI is its Worth Pre-Fill tool, which streamlines SMB onboarding by reducing manual data entry while automating know your business (KYB), know your customer (KYC), and identity verification steps. Users can provide basic information—name, address, TaxID/EIN—and the system retrieves other required data for application completion. This process is designed to lower abandonment rates during onboarding.
The company’s long-term goal is to create a unified business credit score called the Worth Score. This metric consolidates over 1,100 data points into one score intended to help businesses make less biased evaluations of potential customers.
“We really want to make it easy for small businesses to access capital,” Rehmetullah told Hypepotamus.
Rehmetullah credits the sibling partnership with Madhani as a core strength for their team dynamic. He also noted that working together allows each leader to focus on their respective strengths; he concentrates on sales while leveraging complementary skills within the leadership group. Devon Wijesinghe has joined as President—a familiar figure in the Southeast tech ecosystem who previously served as CEO of Insightpool and co-founded e-VERIFILE.
“What we really enjoy is working together to solve big problems,” Rehmetullah said. “Winning is fun, but winning with friends is just better.”
Before launching Fattmerchant (which became Stax) in Orlando in 2014 with his sister—later expanding operations into Atlanta after investment from Fulcrum Equity Partners—Rehmetullah worked at Morgan Stanley and Deloitte and held a position at InsurTech firm Anaplan during its Series C stage.
This time around, fundraising has been easier due to their established track record: earlier this year Worth AI raised $25 million in a round led by Atlanta-based TTV Capital with participation from Florida Funders, DeepWork Capital, Ingeborg Investments, and HorizenNet Capital.
“You’re smarter,” he told Hypepotamus when asked about building a FinTech startup for the second time. “You know what’s around the corner, but it still takes the same amount of time.”
Currently focusing more on customers than investors as Worth AI grows—a team now numbering around 60 people—the company continues hiring actively while keeping attention on mission-driven goals within FinTech innovation.
“I would love to build a multibillion-dollar company this time,” Rehmetullah said. “But the legacy portion this time around is what motivates us.”
