Aunkur Arya

Aunkur is a Board Partner at Menlo Ventures focused on fintech. He draws on his deep experience as both an early-stage and public company operator at Braintree, PayPal, and Google to find promising teams and ideas that will become enduring companies. Aunkur is excited to lock arms with founders who are passionate about and have experienced a “hair on fire” problem firsthand and therefore are uniquely equipped to solve it. He enjoys doing the real work of startup-building alongside founders—making introductions, hiring, thinking through product features, and helping structure partnerships and go-to-market teams.

Throughout his career, Aunkur has worked with entrepreneurs and investors to build and bring new products to market, focusing on API-first services that help companies create new consumer experiences at the intersection of payments, mobile, and advertising. Before joining Menlo Ventures, Aunkur was an executive at PayPal and SVP/GM of Business Development at Braintree. There he led the company’s growth and market launch of new products across both merchant and peer-to-peer payments, including what eventually became PayPal One Touch, a reincarnation of Venmo’s merchant checkout product. During this time, Aunkur started to see problem patterns that were adjacent to payments and needed solving. For example, while partnering with companies like Uber and Airbnb, he noticed how much friction their internal teams encountered moving money between themselves, banks, and their customers and partners. Within Braintree’s own underwriting function, he saw the amount of manual work required to verify and manage ongoing checks of businesses on the platform. His desire to solve these problems led to his interest and subsequent investments in Modern Treasury and MidDesk. Aunkur has invested personally in several other fintech companies, including Parafin and Canopy Servicing, among others. He has a deep interest in the infrastructure and connective tissue that binds the fintech ecosystem together.

Prior to Braintree, Aunkur spent a few years at Google working on their early digital wallet products. He came to Google through the acquisition of AdMob, where he was an early employee and led the buildout of its app developer business. He earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Aunkur is an avid traveler and foodie. He has traversed New Zealand, hiked Patagonia, and enjoyed amazing pasta and wine throughout the far reaches of Tuscany. He lives in San Francisco with his wife (a tech entrepreneur and executive) and daughter.