Why I Joined Imprint

Our vision is to build an AI-native operating system that lets major brands launch financial products with the speed and flexibility of software, while meeting the correctness bar of regulated credit.

I spent nearly a decade at Square building one of Square’s competitive advantages: a data platform that unified everything we know about our customers. Once payments, seller history, buyer behavior, and risk signals connected in the same system, new products became possible like Square Capital and Cash App Boosts. I see a similar opportunity at Imprint, but earlier in the company’s life: brand loyalty, credit, and consumer spend all converging in one product. When we get the foundations right here, we can unlock better underwriting, smarter rewards, and customer experiences that legacy co-brand issuers simply can’t match.

Imprint is in a unique position

At a high level, Imprint helps well-known brands build better credit card and loyalty experiences for their customers. Big bank rewards can be confusing, the experience can feel dated, and the value isn’t always there. Imprint is proving it can be rebuilt from scratch with modern software, clearer incentives, and a much tighter feedback loop between what customers want and what the product does.

The market Imprint is going after is much larger than “store cards.” Co-branded cards already represent hundreds of billions in annual U.S. spend. Deloitte estimates that retail partnership card programs represent more than $350B in spend and roughly 10% of the overall credit card market, yet many of these programs are stagnant because they are built on aging issuer infrastructure, rigid reward systems, and disconnected customer experiences. Imprint’s opportunity is to turn co-brand from a static bank product into a modern loyalty platform.

Imprint is growing quickly (more than doubling revenue YoY), but what really stood out to me is how intentional the company thinks about scaling. Internally, there’s a clear commitment to staying small and highly-leveraged through systems. The idea is that we can build an outsized business without becoming a 1,000+ person organization. What that means in practice is that we design systems that remove toil, automate repetitive work, and keep teams focused on outcomes, not politics or process. The goal is to grow without losing speed, clarity, or ownership. We take culture seriously and don’t compromise. We reward the best outcome and collaboration that enable both our teams and our customers. We want to build the best team that work as one unit and strongly support one another.

Durable advantages and meaningful constraints

Many software companies have weak moats: easy to start, easy to copy, and increasingly easy for AI to copy. Imprint is different because the hard parts are not just screens and CRUD. Co-brand issuing has structural barriers: regulatory trust, bank partnerships, network certifications, and multi-year brand contracts. Building in credit means you have to earn trust from regulators, from bank partners, from brands, and ultimately from customers. Compliance and risk are not back-office chores here; they are part of the product. That raises the bar, and it also creates a real barrier to entry for anyone trying to compete without the operational maturity to meet the standards.

On top of that, Imprint’s partnerships tend to be long-term. When we earn a brand’s trust and sign a contract, we’re building a relationship where we can compound value over years.

Imprint has partners like Booking.com, Rakuten, Crate & Barrel, Fetch, just to name a few example. We see 200% YoY cardholder growth, performance lifts like 2x wallet share / 8x higher LTV / 20% spend lift in migrated programs, and many new major partnerships in the pipeline.

AI increases our leverage

Finally: AI. A lot of industries are wondering whether AI will replace the core business.

In credit, it’s the opposite: the core is fundamentally about good decision-making, strong controls, and a great customer experience. AI can make all three better. Imprint’s opportunity isn’t to put an AI wrapper on credit; it’s to use AI to increase leverage, reduce manual operations, and build experiences that feel simpler and more human, while staying rigorous about risk and compliance.

What makes Imprint interesting as an engineer is that the product looks simple from the outside, but the system underneath is dense: underwriting, money movement, ledgers, rewards, fraud, servicing, partner data, compliance, and mobile all have to work together. Our vision is to build an AI-native operating system that lets major brands launch financial products with the speed and flexibility of software, while meeting the correctness bar of regulated credit.

I joined Imprint because it’s a growth-stage company with genuine upside. It comes from solving hard problems in a category that’s overdue for reinvention. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild how consumer credit works. If you want to build systems at the intersection of ML, financial infrastructure, and consumer product, with a dataset and problem set that doesn’t exist anywhere else, let’s talk!