Stripe brings aboard new head of ‘startup and VC partnerships’

Asya Bradley, a former fintech founder and investor, has joined payments giant Stripe as its new head of Startup & Venture Capital Partnerships.

Bradley announced the news on February 2 in a post on LinkedIn, though her bio shows that she joined Stripe back in November.

Neither Stripe nor Bradley were immediately available for comment. 

Ending in February 2019, Bradley spent three years as the chief revenue office of Synapse, a fintech company that went under in 2024, leaving thousands of its customers surprised and stranded. 

She next served as the VP of revenue at a startup called Sila for five months, became a venture partner with igniteXL Ventures for one year, and, per her LinkedIn, co-founded Kinly, a financial services startup that catered to Black Americans. Kinly was sold in 2023 to Greenwood, itself a digital banking platform for Black and Latino individuals and businesses. Kinly — formerly called First Boulevard, as well as Tenth — had raised a total of about $20 million in funding from investors such as Gabrielle Union, Marshawn Lynch, Kevin Durant, Forerunner Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Barclays, Anthemis Group. 

Bradley is also a limited partner in venture funds, including Cowboy Ventures and Ganas Ventures, and sits on the investment committee of the Cap Table Coalition, a group trying to pull in investors that have been historically left out of the investing process. Richie Serna, whose day job is CEO at payments startup (and Stripe competitor) Finix, helped build CTC. 

Stripe operates a startup partner program in which it says it works with venture capital firms and startup accelerators “to bring exclusive Stripe benefits” to portfolio companies. In recent years, it has acquired a number of startups. Most recently, it announced it was in talks to acquire stablecoin platform Bridge for a whopping $1 billion. Last July,  Stripe made its third acquisition in a 14-month period and at least the 15th total over its lifetime when it picked up 13-person Lemon Squeezy, a merchant of record that calculated and paid global sales tax for digital products, handling legal processing and fees in every country. 

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