Aron Alexander’s entrepreneurial journey is a powerful story of perseverance, reinvention, and vision. It spans from growing up in London’s independent retail scene to founding Runa, a company reshaping how digital money moves worldwide.

Runa has raised funding from top-tier investors like 13books Capital, AlbionVC, Stride.VC, and Fuel Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• 
  
• Aron’s early health battles built resilience that fueled his entrepreneurial journey.
  
• Lessons from the military translated directly into startup execution.
  
• A rebrand from WeGift to Runa unlocked massive strategic growth.
  
• Runa’s infrastructure bypasses traditional payment systems entirely.
  
• Turning down acquisition offers was rooted in a bigger vision for global impact.
  
• Customers validated Runa when investors wavered.
  
• Runa’s ultimate mission is frictionless, global money mobility.
  

 

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About Aron Alexander:

Aron Alexander is the Founder and CEO of Runa, a digital value infrastructure that simplifies payout processes. The platform facilitates a smooth and instant transfer and exchange of digital value, including from fractional shares and gift cards.

With a background in financial services, Aron is a fintech industry veteran who brings a fresh perspective and unique insights to the table. He gained essential business experience from his family’s retail and grocery stores and later managed a substantial portfolio in a family office.

A graduate from Cambridge, Aron worked with a prominent B2B2C payment company. Inspired by a £5 paper voucher, he founded Runa (formerly WeGift) in 2016.

WeGift expanded quickly, developing a network of 1,300+ brand partners and working with some of the world’s largest and most-influential companies, including Rapyd, Tango Card, Monzo, and Freetrade.

In 2023, WeGift became Runa, a digital value infrastructure that enables organisations to issue, send, hold and accept digital value and enable the instant conversion & exchange of digital gift cards, shares, crypto, donations and other digital assets.

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Connect with Aron Alexander:

• 
  
• LinkedIn
  
• Crunchbase
  
• RocketReach
  
• TheOrg
  

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker show. Today we have a really fantastic founder. We’re going to be talking about the good stuff that we like to hear—the building, the scaling, the financing, and really amazing stories of turning down acquisition offers. Also, stories of perseverance, as well as taking a look at rebranding and positioning—you know, that’s not easy at all.

Alejandro Cremades: But again, I think the story of our founder today is going to be quite inspiring. So brace yourself for a very powerful conversation. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today—Aron Alexander, welcome to the show.

Aron Alexander: Thanks so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born in London—give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Aron Alexander: Interesting times. So I was born, as you said, in London. I grew up in a family who owned independent retail stores. I guess part of my journey in building Runa really stems from the experiences there—growing up and working in a grocery store, a bakery, or a clothing store with a pricing gun in my hand. I saw the grit, determination, and effort of building something from scratch, the day-to-day grind, and the attention to detail.

Aron Alexander: And customer care. That was really quite an informative experience. I had a lot of other experiences growing up that taught me a lot about building a business.

Aron Alexander: I don’t need to go into all of them, but some might be interesting in terms of resilience and perseverance. I unfortunately had to go through about 20 operations before I was 19, which really taught me a lot about keeping going when there’s no finish line in sight and trying to stay the course when things are difficult. Definitely, as a founder, you go through a lot of pain on the journey, but I think that was good preparation for building a business.

Aron Alexander: Rolling forward, I started the company when I was 17. Fortunately—

Alejandro Cremades: And before that too, I mean, I think that’s so powerful what you mentioned there, because being a founder is all about living with uncertainty—being okay with not knowing what the future holds. You know, in the morning everything is great; by night, things are falling apart. It’s just the cycle you go through.

Alejandro Cremades: I guess in your case too, as you were saying—dealing with 20 operations, health-wise—that’s very difficult. Ultimately, it’s about dealing with uncertainty, but doing so at a very early stage in your life. How do you think that shaped who you are today?

Aron Alexander: I think the thing to think about there is that we all go through difficult things. Everyone has their challenges. We don’t all start from the same position. The learning for me was that you’ve got to find a way to hold on to what’s important to you to keep going.

Aron Alexander: Then use those experiences to try and build something for yourself—to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve in life. If you can go through something difficult in one part of your life, instead of letting it be something that holds you back or is only a period of trauma that’s hard to process, you can actually use it as fuel to go do something meaningful.

Aron Alexander: We don’t always choose the things we go through, but it’s about making the most of them and doing what you can with the things you can control to create something that matters to you.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, for you, obviously, you were going through schooling and education, but you decided to drop out and go into the military. That’s quite the course of action.

Aron Alexander: Well, I had, as I mentioned, the health issues going on, so I couldn’t really finish school with all the A-levels that I probably wanted to. I had to take a step back, and I wanted to do things that rewarded the other skills I had—determination and focus.

Aron Alexander: Maybe you can use those in academia, but I didn’t have the opportunity to go to the best institutions at that stage of my life. Going into the military really taught me a lot about excellence.

Aron Alexander: If you persevere, there are paths to achieving things you didn’t think were possible—not to mention the teamwork, planning, and resilience needed to operate in an infantry unit.

Aron Alexander: That all kind of maps to building a company as well.

Aron Alexander: I was fortunate after that to teach myself my remaining A-levels while working, and I earned a place at Cambridge University. I think the experiences that inspired me in the military—like working hard to create opportunities—showed me that doesn’t just apply to military life, but to any part of life.

Aron Alexander: Again, it’s about taking what you have and seeing how far you can go. That’s something I lacked in school but learned in the military, and it really allowed me to move forward in other areas of life.

Alejandro Cremades: How do you think Cambridge changed things for you professionally?

Aron Alexander: That was a real experience in a multitude of ways. It was a culture shock for me personally, not coming from that background—first in my family to go to university. I think I was the first to finish high school.

Aron Alexander: There were some amazing experiences there that doubled down on what I said earlier. Cambridge is known for academic excellence, but it’s also a center of excellence in many other areas—whether it’s the rowing team, Footlights comedy, or other activities. You see a lot of high achievers—not just in academia.

Aron Alexander: I got a great grounding in analytical thinking there. I was pushed to my limit and acquired new skills that I still use today—first principles thinking, solid research, and effectively presenting information about markets, customers, or documentation.

Aron Alexander: But it also reinforced that if you focus and master your craft, you can excel in any area—not just academia or the military. That shaped my thinking and how I approach things today.

Alejandro Cremades: Now in this case, you ended up going into a payments company, then a family office, and then into the world of entrepreneurship. Walk us through those events that led you there.

Aron Alexander: I was fortunate to grow up in a family of entrepreneurs and got exposed to that early on. So from a familiarity perspective, it felt like something I had seen a lot.

Aron Alexander: I started my first business at 17 in school. I actually started my second one while at university, again in the investment space.

Aron Alexander: The family office was during the time I was teaching myself A-levels—so a little earlier. But the point is that having had those experiences—growing up and through school and university—I always felt a drive to solve problems.

Aron Alexander: I was fortunate to go through some internships in financial services while at university. I did some trading and forex—Runa does a lot of cross-border money movement.

Aron Alexander: I also did equity research in retail, and Runa works with retail merchants where you can spend money sent via Runa. So I had a lot of different experiences that mapped to what we’re building today.

Aron Alexander: After university, I worked at a payments company that integrated into retail point-of-sale systems. Runa is kind of a Venn diagram between my entrepreneurial background, payments experience, financial markets exposure, and tech familiarity—all of which came together to build a new infrastructure for sending and spending digital money.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about entering Runa. How did you decide Runa was the right thing for you?

Aron Alexander: It was about spending time in the market—seeing the problems and figuring out which ones were the most important to solve. At the payments company, it took us about a year to get separate new accounts approved by the banking system and maybe even longer to work with Visa.

Aron Alexander: This was back in 2013—things were different. But at the time, it seemed like traditional banking and card rails were extremely difficult for businesses to interoperate with.

Aron Alexander: During that period, I received a $5 paper voucher refund in the mail. Having worked a bit in retail, the cost of picking, packing, and shipping something with such little value didn’t make sense to me.

Aron Alexander: I looked into it and realized that money is just an agreement between two parties—a medium of exchange to access goods and services—but it requires both parties to agree on that medium.

Aron Alexander: We use card rails and fiat cash to power that exchange, but this voucher was a multi-store voucher running completely outside of those rails. It didn’t need a bank account. If I could digitize it, I could move it instantly to anyone. Merchants got better commissions compared to traditional interchange—especially in Europe, where that’s low.

Aron Alexander: The traditional rails were failing businesses and consumers. If you can integrate directly with enough merchants, you can build your own rails to move digital money instantly in any format to anyone, anywhere.

Aron Alexander: That felt like an important problem to solve. I validated the idea, found businesses struggling with payouts—refunds, rewards, loyalty redemptions, freelancer remittances—and followed the insight to build Runa.

Alejandro Cremades: For the people listening—what ended up being the business model of Runa? How do you make money?

Aron Alexander: Runa is an infrastructure that allows companies to send digital money to the people they serve for various use cases—class action payouts, refunds, rewards, remittances, and more.

Aron Alexander: Businesses deposit money on one side—say $100,000—and can send $1 to 100,000 people in real time. Each person gets a link that serves as a wallet. They can spend that link online or in-store with over 5,000 merchants in 50+ countries.

Aron Alexander: It’s an appless, cardless, bankless way of transferring money. Every redemption triggers a merchant commission—that’s how we make money. Sometimes customers pay access fees because it’s such a novel, frictionless, global way of sending and spending money.

Aron Alexander: What’s really interesting now is that we’ve built our own merchant network, and we’re now adding other off-ramps to Runa—moving money into bank accounts or onto prepaid cards.

Aron Alexander: We’ve dabbled with stablecoins in the past, and we’ll be bringing that online again. So it’s really about the ability to move money to anyone, anywhere instantly—specifically right now from a business to a consumer. And then we make money on the redemptions that happen when those consumers spend online or in-store.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was it to go through the first stages of the company? I know that even early on, you guys almost ran out of money. So it sounds like it was bumpy.

Aron Alexander: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s a difficult thing to try to sell—building a new rail. And working in the UK in the earlier stages of venture, almost nine years ago now, was a different market and a different fundraising environment.

Aron Alexander: We were lucky to have the backing of a few angels and to start getting some traction. But there was a point where I got a phone call from one of my team saying, “Well, actually, we may not have money to make payroll next month.”

Aron Alexander: You’re like, how did that happen? Things are moving so fast, and sometimes you can kind of get lost in the swirl of things. That taught me a lot about being on top of all the details in the business. We had a really hairy moment where we were wondering how we were going to continue to build the company if we couldn’t make payroll next month.

Aron Alexander: You kind of run out of runway, run out of time. But we were lucky that we had people who believed in the vision from the investor side who backed us. We had some early customers who were prepared to take the leap with us—kind of before we really had a working product. It was more of a concierge service.

Aron Alexander: Then we managed to prove that people wanted what we had, and that allowed us to raise some institutional money and bridge that gap. But it was definitely touch-and-go there for a second. I think every company has those near-death experiences, especially when you’re trying to build something new.

Aron Alexander: I read once: if you want to build something really innovative, prepare to be misunderstood. So I think we definitely were—for a while—and we managed to find a way through it.

Alejandro Cremades: In that case too, you guys have raised about $55 million. How has the journey been, going through the motions of raising all that money?

Aron Alexander: I think, again, at least for me—and I’m sure for many people out there—life is like a series of reinventions. You just have to iterate your way through and learn how things work. It definitely took a while to understand the whole way of selling, storytelling, and plotting a line from where you are to where you want to get to.

Aron Alexander: We were really lucky to find people who believed in the vision of a whole new way of sending and spending money, who saw the opportunity, who believed in me and the team.

Aron Alexander: We were fortunate to raise a Prophecy Round in 2019. That gave us the fuel to prove out the product risk and the go-to-market risk. Then, during COVID, we had another touch-and-go moment with our Series A. We had a bunch of people lined up, due to the traction of the business, who were super excited—kind of got to IC.

Aron Alexander: There were three or four funds very engaged with us.

Aron Alexander: And overnight, you kind of wonder where everyone disappeared to—if they’d moved country or something. Then we got the party line of, “We’ve got some stuff going on, we have to think about this a bit more.” No one wanted to be direct. That was just as COVID was hitting in late March 2020.

Aron Alexander: We had the rug pulled out from underneath us, which I’m sure happens to many companies, but it’s never fun. Again, we focused on the problem and got our heads down.

Aron Alexander: We proved that customers wanted what we were building. And if you do that, you will find partners who want to back you. That really is the story.

Alejandro Cremades: The rebrand you guys went through was quite the challenge as well. Rebranding is painful. How did you go about it, and why did it make sense?

Aron Alexander: This again was maybe the naivety of starting a technology company for the first time with no resources. You’re trying to tell the story but maybe don’t know how. At least for us, we tried to get an agency involved, but didn’t really have much money to professionally approach this.

Aron Alexander: We thought, well, we’re building our network using gift cards as a hack—a way to get retailers to accept the digital money we were issuing. All our customers wanted gift cards at the time. We didn’t think about the future enough, I think. So we thought a simple, SEO-friendly way to explain what we do was to call ourselves “WeGift.”

Aron Alexander: But underneath the hood, we were building a really powerful engine to move any form of value to anyone, anywhere, instantly. We even did an integration with Coinbase, where we were cashing out cryptocurrencies in 2018 in real time, while the rest of the market was taking five days and charging 3–4% in fees.

Aron Alexander: We would give a bonus on top. We were building some really cool stuff, but it was hard to get the market to understand that.

Aron Alexander: So we persevered with the naming, but it was quite a jarring experience—trying to talk about future payment infrastructure while dragging along the millstone of “gift cards.”

Aron Alexander: We realized early on that we needed to change the name. It took a while to get there, but we eventually told our story better by rebranding to Runa.

Aron Alexander: The name speaks to the mysticism of moving money instantly. How do you make money appear somewhere in real time? If you give me dollars, I give you gift cards. If you give me euros, I give you crypto. If you give me pounds, I give you airtime credit.

Aron Alexander: The idea of runes and the mystical movement of value was something we really attached to. It helped people put us in the right box and think of us the right way. Then we were able to attract the right talent, the next set of investors, and the right customers.

Aron Alexander: There’s an old saying—what’s in a name?

Aron Alexander: I’ve learned: a lot is in a name. Maybe to our detriment in the early years. But it’s been transformative for the business. It’s a super hard lift, but if you can think about what drives value for customers and how to communicate that in a way that tells a story, it’s going to help you move a lot faster.

Alejandro Cremades: Talking about checking the boxes, there were a series of acquisition offers that you received but turned down. Turning down acquisitions is a really big deal. Why not? And how do you think about timing when it comes to acquisitions?

Aron Alexander: Everyone has their own set of criteria. For us, we had a lot of legacy players in our space at the time—this is around 2018–2020.

Aron Alexander: We were building a Stripe for digital incentives and rewards. It was really cool tech and would’ve been valuable for certain incumbents.

Aron Alexander: But the vision was always so much bigger. It felt like we’d be selling ourselves really short. We could take the money on the table, but I believe Runa has a massive opportunity to redefine the whole industry.

Aron Alexander: At the moment, we’re already impacting the lives of tens of millions of people every year who receive money through Runa. I think we’ll reach 40 million people this year. These individuals receive money in real time and spend it faster than they would through traditional rails.

Aron Alexander: If you can keep going on that journey and impact hundreds of millions—potentially billions—that felt like the financial outcome would take care of itself. If you can take the pain and keep going, you get to build something that matters. That doesn’t come along very often.

Aron Alexander: For me, it was like, “You know what? I can keep going—pain’s an old friend,” kind of adage.

Aron Alexander: The upside was just so much bigger than the near term. Thinking long-term about the impact you want to have and the outcomes you want to achieve—that was my guiding principle.

Alejandro Cremades: Let’s talk about the outcomes you want to achieve. Let’s say you go to sleep tonight, Aron, and wake up in a world where Runa’s vision is fully realized. What does that world look like?

Aron Alexander: I think we’ve connected to every merchant that matters to consumers and built the ability for anyone—business or consumer—to send money to someone else, anywhere, instantly, outside the card and banking rails, in a way that’s personalized, data-rich, faster, and more economic—driving more revenue for everyone.

Aron Alexander: That looks like an API to make payouts to consumers, like consumers receiving money in a real wallet, sending money to each other, then using that wallet to pay merchants. Businesses using Runa to send money to other businesses—unifying all payment flows in one elegant, simplified platform.

Aron Alexander: Making money frictionless—just like the internet. Making money as simple as an email.

Aron Alexander: Money is moving on from the days of PayPal into formats people care about more and more. It’s more localized—wallets, gaming credits, cryptocurrencies.

Aron Alexander: The digital universes we’re building now mean money takes many forms. Our vision is to make all of those interoperable and seamless with the mainstream economy—to enable people to access goods and services wherever they are, whenever they need them.

Alejandro Cremades: Now imagine I put you in a time machine. Let’s go back to when you were coming out of Cambridge, entering payments, family office, all of that—and starting to think about launching something.

Alejandro Cremades: If you could sit with your younger self and give one piece of advice before launching the business, what would it be and why?

Aron Alexander: At the risk of repeating myself, I think it would have been the branding. That felt like the biggest unlock we created for ourselves. The opportunity is there in our market.

Aron Alexander: It’s just—can you engage the right audiences with messaging that resonates so you can deliver the value? Because if you build the best product in the world and no one sees it—if you don’t have distribution—it doesn’t matter.

Aron Alexander: Looking back, if we had nailed the branding earlier, I think we would have attracted the best talent sooner, the right investors sooner, and the right customers sooner.

Aron Alexander: We wouldn’t have had to wait so long to really step into ourselves the way we are now.

Aron Alexander: That was our journey. For others, it might be different. But if I were to go back and redirect the ship, that would be the advice.

Alejandro Cremades: I love it. Well, Aron, for the people listening who’d love to reach out and say hi, what’s the best way for them to do so?

Aron Alexander: You can reach me at ar**@**na.io or feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Easy enough. Well, Aron, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an honor to have you with us.

Aron Alexander: Thank you so much for your time.

*****

If you like the show, make sure that you hit that subscribe button. If you can leave a review as well, that would be fantastic. And if you got any value either from this episode or from the show itself, share it with a friend. Perhaps they will also appreciate it. Also, remember, if you need any help, whether it is with your fundraising efforts or with selling your business, you can reach me at al*******@**************rs.com