Recall Sessions: Itai Damti on Embedded Finance and the Art of Getting Your First Customer

I'm Sharman Yogi, and I'm guest hosting a new series for the Village Global Podcast called Recall Sessions. Everyone talks about product, but I wanna talk about something that doesn't get enough attention, go to market. Specifically, how do the world's most successful companies get their first customers? I'll be sitting down with founders and operators of billion dollar companies to hear the real story, not the polished version where everything just clicked, the messy version, the cold emails, the first deals, the selling before the product was even ready. My guest today is Atai Damte, cofounder and CEO of UNIT. UNIT is the platform that lets companies offer accounts, cards, money movement, and capital under their own brand. They move over $50,000,000,000 annually, serve 2,000,000 plus end users across a 100 plus platforms, and power programs at seven public companies, including Wix and Worldpay. This is a Thai second company with his cofounder, Daron Somek. They previously built Lever Rate together, which they bootstrapped to a 160 employees and over a $100,000,000,000 in monthly trading volume. They've been building fintech companies and working together for over twenty years. We're going back to the early days before Unit became Unit. Alright. It's high. I I've actually been wanting to do this for several years. There's not a lot of lot of people that have, you know, started an embedded business. You guys have gotten to a significant scale. You've been doing it the last few years. And, you know, as someone who, talks to a lot of founders that are building embedded businesses, I think there's there's not many people in the world that have the type of experience that has gone through the journey of building an embedded business. And so I appreciate you giving us the opportunity and our listeners to hear about your story and and some of the early days of how you built Unit. So thank you for taking the time. Thanks for inviting me. Excited to be here and share. So, you know, maybe we can kinda start, from the early days. Like, you know, how did Unit kinda get started? You know, I know you and Jerome, had a prior company. We'd love to hear, to kind of sort of kinda set the stage of the history of of Unit, and we're gonna just jump right in and talk about how you built UNIT and how you got your early customers. Awesome. Yeah. So we started the company in 2019. We had known each other for about fifteen years at the time. Actually, we'd be all together for most of those years. For both Doron and me, this is our third company. The first one was a shared experience, a decade long experience. We left the business in 2016. We both started second companies and failed independently. And then we got together in 2019 to start what became Unit. I'm an engineer by background. He was CTO at the first business. I wasn't …