Slash

Slash was conceived in 2020 by teenage computer science students Kevin Jiang and Andrew Liu inside their Stanford University dorm room. The founders were deeply embedded in the high-speed sneaker and luxury streetwear flipping market, where specialized software bots buy limited-edition inventory in milliseconds. They realized that traditional banks like Chase instantly flagged and blocked young side-hustlers who were running thousands of daily checkout attempts across multiple digital aliases, completely breaking their automated flipping operations.

Jiang and Liu dropped out of Stanford after securing substantial funding, officially launching Slash out of stealth in 2022 with a massive $19 million capital injection led by NEA. The secret weapon that drove Slash's explosive word-of-mouth adoption was its radical legal architecture: the platform allowed teenagers under the age of 18 to legally open functional business banking accounts with parental co-signers. Slash automated the generation of thousands of unique, high-limit virtual debit cards that allowed young resellers to bypass merchant anti-bot filters without getting their accounts frozen.

Realizing that the hype-beast sneaker flipping market was cyclical, Slash aggressively expanded its financial software footprint in 2024 into the broader creator and influencer economies. The platform introduced automated split-payment features designed for young digital entrepreneurs who run multi-author TikTok accounts, YouTube networks, and clothing brands. By allowing users to instantly route custom percentages of card revenues to different partners while automating tax allocations, Slash captured the primary cash flow of the teenage internet economy.

By mid-2026, Slash emerged as the premier digital neo-banking layer for over 80,000 Gen Z digital micro-enterprises across the United States. Under the continued leadership of its young founders, the private company expanded into automated tax preparation software and integrated micro-working capital lending lines. Backed by solid interchange revenues generated from billions of dollars in high-velocity programmatic card volume, Slash maintained a highly lean engineering structure in San Francisco while expanding its specialized card infrastructure.