Why Accounts Receivable Is Fintech's Biggest Untapped Market With Caitlin Leksana, CEO of Fazeshift

Accounts payable has produced multiple billion-dollar companies, yet its mirror image, accounts receivable, remains almost entirely manual at most enterprises despite decades of software spend. In this episode, Caitlin Leksana, co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, explains why AR has remained unsolved and how her company's AI agents are changing that. A mechanical engineer turned BCG consultant turned founder, Caitlin came to the problem the hard way, doing her own AR by hand at a previous startup, and her outsider's view of a stubborn back-office chore is exactly what makes the conversation worth your time.What We CoveredA million AR analysts doing manual work in the USWhy accounts payable got solved and AR did notThe leverage imbalance between AP and AR departmentsThe swivel chair problem and fragmented data$200 million in unapplied cash on one balance sheetFazeshift as a context layer, not a rip-and-replaceWhy traditional SaaS and if-then logic could never scale ARThe collections, cash application, and AR inbox modulesHuman in the loop and building trust when AI touches moneyTraining agents on historical data and tribal knowledgeFrom Y Combinator to a Series A led by F-PrimeThe vision for the context layer and autonomous financeKey TakeawaysAR is the inverse of AP, and every bill is someone else's invoice, so the market is at least as large and mostly uncaptured.The real unlock is not the AI model but unifying fragmented data across the ERP, bank, CRM, and inbox into a single context layer.Human in the loop with full auditability is what earns risk-averse finance teams' trust, and it is how agents move toward full automation over time.Some of the best unsolved startup problems are the ones furthest removed from an engineer, because no one with the tools to fix them ever felt the pain.About Caitlin LeksanaCaitlin Leksana is the co-founder and CEO of Fazeshift, a San Francisco startup building AI agents for accounts receivable. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, advised Fortune 500 companies at BCG, and earned her MBA at Harvard Business School before founding a crypto marketing startup and then Fazeshift. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, raised a $4M seed led by Gradient Ventures, and announced a Series A led by F-Prime in 2026.Connect with Fintech One-on-One:Tweet me @PeterRentonConnect with me on LinkedInFind previous Fintech One-on-One episodes