Sahej Suri is the founder of Blue Dot Investors, a late-stage growth equity firm that invests exclusively in fintech across both primaries and secondaries. Before Blue Dot, he built his career at J.P. Morgan, TPG, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. In this conversation, Sahej explains the scrappy origin story of the firm, the overlooked opportunity in fintech secondaries, and his new report with FT Partners on the coming fintech liquidity supercycle, including the finding that the top 100 private fintechs now out-earn the top 100 public ones.

What We Covered

• Sahej's path from J.P. Morgan to TPG to QED
• The 2008 recession and why access to financial services stuck with him
• The happenstance origin story of Blue Dot
• Why fintech is closer to biotech than to generalist tech
• The gap in the market for late-stage fintech specialists
• Why the top 10 names dominate secondary market activity
• Finding undervalued companies outside the marquee names
• The "Liquidity Supercycle" report with FT Partners and how it came together
• Why the top 100 private fintechs out-earn the top 100 public ones
• The state of the IPO window and the SpaceX bellwether
• Why the 2025 IPO cohort cleared a much higher bar
• The have versus have-nots dynamic in fintech fundraising
• The Blue Dot dinner series and building community
• His AI thesis and where the value creation will land
• A 10-year view on fintech as an asset class

Key Takeaways

• The best fintech companies are now private, and on the top 100 they out-earn their public peers on revenue, a finding Sahej says had never been put on paper before.
• Fintech rewards specialists. Banking, payments, capital markets, and insurance are almost different worlds, and most investors who piled in during 2021 without that depth are no longer around.
• The IPO window is real but conditional. The 2025 cohort was roughly three times the size on revenue and more profitable than historical norms, and the near-term window hinges on how bellwether listings perform.
• Sahej's bet on AI value creation is not the startups or the large AI labs, but the scaled fintechs that already own distribution and customer trust.

About Sahej Suri

Sahej Suri is the founder and Managing Partner of Blue Dot Investors, a New York-based late-stage growth equity firm investing exclusively in fintech across primaries and secondaries. He previously worked at J.P. Morgan in the financial institutions group, at TPG in growth equity and buyouts, and as chief of staff to Nigel Morris at QED Investors. Blue Dot came out of stealth in early 2026 and manages roughly $100M in assets, with a team of six and around 30 advisors. Peter is an advisor to Blue Dot Investors.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Dimitri Masin was one of the first 30 employees at Monzo, where he led AI and data science as the bank grew from 30 to 4,000 people. That vantage point showed him where the real work in financial services still lives: the manual, repetitive customer operations running behind the app. In 2023, he co-founded Gradient Labs to automate that work with fully autonomous AI agents, and the company now serves more than 30 fintech and financial services customers. In this conversation, we get into why co-pilots can quietly degrade quality and compliance, why Dimitri believes full autonomy is the safer path, and the story behind what may be the largest known AI agent deployment in banking.

What We Covered

• From Google to one of the first 30 people at Monzo
• The second half of the fintech transformation
• Why customer operations never got reinvented
• What GPT-4 unlocked at the start of 2023
• Putting banks on autopilot
• Sitting as an orchestration layer over existing systems
• The 15% customer experience uplift over human teams
• Why cost savings are more nuanced than people expect
• How bank implementations and bake-offs actually work
• Why co-pilots can degrade quality and compliance
• The case for full autonomy over a human in the loop
• Benchmarking agents against the human team, not perfection
• Redeploying staff instead of cutting headcount
• The largest known AI agent deployment in banking
• Why banks aren't seeing productivity gains yet
• The build-it-ourselves mindset shift
• A five to ten year view of the transformation
• How the US bake-off culture plays to a specialist's advantage

Key Takeaways

• The overlooked opportunity in banking is not the app experience but the manual operational work behind it: customer support, AML, fraud, KYC, onboarding, and screening.
• Co-pilots can backfire. When suggestions are right 90% of the time, people start accepting them blindly, which degrades quality and compliance in the other 10%.
• No agent is correct 100% of the time, and that is the wrong bar. The right question is whether the system beats the human team it replaces, which becomes the benchmark.
• Automation has not meant layoffs at any of Gradient Labs' customers. Teams get redeployed to complex, higher-empathy work like vulnerability and financial difficulty cases.
• The bottleneck on transformation is not the technology, which has existed since GPT-4, but how slowly organizations diffuse and adopt it. Dimitri's horizon is five to ten years.

About Dimitri Masin

Dimitri Masin is the CEO and co-founder of Gradient Labs, a London-based startup building autonomous AI agents that run customer operations for regulated financial services companies. Before founding the company in 2023 with two former Monzo colleagues, he was among the first 30 employees at Monzo, where he led AI, data science, financial crime, and fraud as the bank scaled to roughly 4,000 people. He started his career at Google.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Yuval Refua is the Chief Product Officer at Navan, the global travel and expense platform he joined seven years ago when it was still just a travel booking service. Since then, he has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up, turning the company policy that used to live in a PDF into code that runs on the card itself. This conversation matters because T&E is one of the most universally disliked workflows in business, and Navan is rethinking it from scratch just as AI and agentic commerce start to reshape how companies spend.

What We Covered

• Falling in love with credit cards at American Express
• Why Navan started as a travel-only booking service
• The reconciliation pain that led to launching a card
• Coding company policy directly onto the card
• Real-time approval the moment you swipe
• Why travel-first beats procurement-first
• Context as the key to managing distributed spend
• Going global with VAT, GST, per diems and mileage
• The e-invoicing wave hitting more countries
• The GTA model for revealing complexity gradually
• The Expense Admin Companion and recommended actions
• From single approvals to bulk to full automation
• The Visa partnership and the Connect product
• Waymo for travelers, Formula One for finance

Key Takeaways

• The expense report exists to answer a question that company policy already settled. Coding that policy onto the card removes the work instead of automating it.
• Starting from travel gives Navan context (where the employee is, why they are there, who they are visiting) that procurement-first tools lack, which makes per-employee limits far smarter.
• Going global is less about features and more about mastering country-by-country tax, e-invoicing, per diem and mileage rules.
• The path to full automation runs through trust. Navan moves finance teams from a single recommended action, to bulk approvals, to hands-off automation, which is also how it intends to handle agentic spend.

About Yuval Refua

Yuval Refua is Chief Product Officer at Navan. He started two companies of his own early in his career before moving into fintech and product management at Thomson Reuters, then American Express, where he developed a deep love for credit cards and the rails behind them. He joined Navan around seven years ago and has built out its payments and expense products from the ground up.

Connect with Fintech One-on-One:

• Tweet me @PeterRenton
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes