About Lightspark
Make Money Flow. Unlock Global Opportunity.
The internet lacks an open protocol for money. We're building what's needed. With enterprise-ready infrastructure for the Lightning Network, Lightspark services and tools are the easiest and most reliable way to send and receive payments globally.
We help our customers deliver payments for the Internet at scale and improve the financial system for everyone. We’re headquartered in Los Angeles but serve the world.
Leadership Team
We’re a mission-driven team based in Los Angeles. We build at the edge of new technologies, delivering best-in-class engineering, product, design, and client-orientated experiences. We thrive in entrepreneurial environments, enjoy writing and shipping superior code at pace, and are team players with a culture of engineering excellence.
David Marcus
Chief Executive Officer
David is the CEO and co-founder of Lightspark. Most recently, he led all payments and crypto efforts on Meta/Facebook. In 2018, David started Diem (fka Libra). He joined Meta in 2014 to lead Messenger, which he took from under 200M monthly users to over 1.5B. Previously, he was PayPal’s President. A lifelong entrepreneur, David launched two companies in Europe and then founded mobile payments company Zong in Silicon Valley, which was acquired by PayPal in 2011.
Nicolas Cabrera
VP of Product
Nicolas is the VP of Product at Lightspark. He was the Chief Product Officer at Bakkt, the Digital Asset Payment and Crypto Exchange platform funded by ICE: NYSE, where he led all product strategy and crypto payment platform development. Previously, he held leadership roles at eBay and PayPal Australia as Head of Product and Brand, where he developed global product innovations. Nicolas also co-founded Westfield Labs/OneMarket and developed unique retail product solutions for mobile payments, eCommerce, and integrated digital wallets.
Christian Catalini
Chief Strategy Officer
Christian is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer. He previously co-created Diem (fka Libra). He is the founder of the MIT Crypto Economics Lab, and designed the MIT Bitcoin experiment in 2013. His research has been featured in top journals — including Science, Nature, Communications of the ACM — and presented to leading global academic institutions and government organizations. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.
Vincent Durmont
Head of Engineering
Vincent is the Head of Engineering at Lightspark. Most recently, Vincent has held engineering and management positions at Meta/Facebook, where he worked on a wide range of projects, including Diem (fka Libra) and Novi. Throughout his career, he focused on distributed systems and developer experience.
Kevin Hurley
Chief Technology Officer
Kevin is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. He has extensive experience in the payments ecosystem, including roles at Meta/Facebook and worked on Diem (fka Libra), Novi, Messenger, and WhatsApp payments. Kevin has designed and built numerous aspects of blockchain infrastructure.
Jane Martin
Chief People Officer
Jane is the Chief People Officer at Lightspark. With over 20 years of experience in recruiting, she has scaled and diversified talent for high-growth and early-stage companies in various industries, such as technology, philanthropy, healthcare, education, and fintech.
Jai Massari
Chief Legal Officer
Jai is co-founder and Chief Legal Officer. Previously she was a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and a leader of the firm’s fintech and cryptocurrency practice. She is a fellow of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business at Berkeley Law School.
Christina Smedley
Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
Christina is co-founder and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer for Lightspark. In the past she has led the marketing, communications, content and brand teams at Amazon, Edelman, Facebook/Meta, PayPal and Robinhood.
Geoff Teehan
Chief Design Officer
Geoff is Chief Design Officer with 30 years of experience as a designer, leader and entrepreneur. Previously he was the VP and Head of Design at Meta/Facebook, and also led design for Meta/Facebook's News Feed and Novi. He co-founded the trailblazing digital product design firm Teehan+Lax, which was acquired by Meta in 2015.
Tomer Barel
Operating Partner
Tomer is co-founder and Operating Partner at Lightspark and President & COO at Melio. He has a diverse background in risk management, operations, data science, and executive leadership roles at Meta/Facebook(Novi) and PayPal - where he oversaw Fraud, Credit, Data Science, Data Platforms, Operations and Customer Service.
Life at Lightspark
We asked a few members of our team to share a little more about their roles and what it’s like to work at Lightspark.
Rachel Malonson
Engineering Manager
What is the technical challenge you are most excited to solve?
I’m really excited about expanding the Lightning Network to support transactions and seeing how impactful that can be for the world.
Why did you join Lightspark?
I was equally excited about the vision and product as I was about the people I’d be working with, which is extremely rare. I worked on payments for a few years at my previous company and experienced a lot of the frustrations with the current systems first hand, so I was really excited about the possibility of making improvements there. Everyone on the team also has extremely impressive backgrounds and experience, so I knew it’d be a great opportunity to learn from some of the best.
What’s the team like?
To me it’s honestly the dream team. Everyone on the team is not only highly intelligent and hard-working but also really kind and generous. They are always willing to lend a helping hand and everyone works really well together to get things done.
Michael Gorven
Senior Production Engineer
What brought you to Lightspark?
The opportunity to work with a team of awesome people, building something new from the ground up. An environment of solving challenging problems is also something I really enjoy.
What does your team work on?
I work on deploying Lightspark’s code and supporting services to the cloud. In terms of code that includes database access, authentication and security all with the goal of enabling Lightspark to help customers manage Lightning nodes at scale.
What’s the best thing about working at Lightspark?
It’s fun and interesting. The team is ambitious and we have some of the best engineers I have ever worked with.
Yun Yu
Senior Software Engineer
Why did you join Lightspark?
This is my second job, I joined my last company post my PhD. I was at my old company for six years and focused on one specific area but had the opportunity to work in different parts of the business. What I have realized though is that the people I work with are important to me and so joining the team at Lightspark is the best decision I ever made - smaller company with huge passion.
What’s the technical challenge you are most excited to solve in your role?
I’m excited to build tools - like data infrastructure. Here I get to think about how to build new things that already existed in my last job and so it’s exciting to determine what we build to help the engineers that will come after me.
What have you learned at Lightspark?
I learnt a lot about how the Lightning Network works and how it can change the way people make payments. I’ve also learnt about what it’s like to work in a small company and build everything from scratch.
Corey Martin
Web Front End Engineer
Why did you join Lightspark?
I really believe that Bitcoin and Lightning are the best solution for decentralized payments and I’d like to do everything I can to help make them successful. This team is the right one for the job and I feel lucky to be able to work with everyone.
What’s the team like?
There’s a culture of support and flexibility which makes for a great work experience. At the same time the team is best in class so there are also lots of opportunities for growth and learning.
Describe Lightspark in three words?
Exciting, inspiring and fun.
Our Investors
