Team

Jay is drawn to founders rebuilding financial services from first principles and to the systems, incentives, and infrastructure underneath them. He'd rather understand how something works than outsource the understanding. As a General Partner and co-founder of Propel, Jay has spent over two decades inside financial services and fintech. He started as a credit analyst and commercial loan officer, then spent nearly a decade at Visa across finance, business development, and Corporate Development and Strategic Alliances. He later joined BBVA as Executive Director of Corporate Development and Strategy, where he helped the bank act on digital transformation, led investments in Coinbase, DocuSign, Personal Capital, SumUp, and Taulia, and executed the $117M acquisition of Simple. Originally from Milwaukee and a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, Jay has lived in the Bay Area for 25 years.

David enjoys investing as early as possible in ambitious founders across the globe. He's excited about opportunities to unlock the new economy, such as AI, financial technology, and energy and compute infrastructure. As a General Partner and co-founder of Propel, David has been investing since 2016. Originally from Milwaukee, he was drawn west by a desire to be closer to the startup capital, where he landed his first job at SVB Financial Group. At SVB, David supported category-defining companies through valuation and advisory services, while helping the bank identify top-performing companies. After SVB, David joined Jay at BBVA, in the Corporate Development and M&A team, where they backed Coinbase, DocuSign, SumUp, Taulia, and Personal Capital, and the $117M acquisition of Simple, an early leading neobank. David is a University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and lives in the Bay Area with his wife and kids.

Braeden is especially interested in AI in services, AI safety/security, insurance, and the financialization behind physical infrastructure. He likes finding people building in these spaces in niche online communities. At Propel, he works with founders across the firm's portfolio and helps identify the next generation of companies to back. Before Propel, he spent a summer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and worked at a fintech media startup. A Chicago suburbs native and University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science graduate, he now lives in San Francisco.

Hunter is the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Compliance Officer at Propel, where he has managed the firm's finances and compliance since joining in 2024. Before Propel, he spent over five years running fund accounting at ACME Capital and began his career in audit at EY and Deloitte. A Tennessee native and Rhodes College grad, he now lives in the Bay Area.