Worth Co-Founder Suneera Madhani Named to Most Influential Leaders List

Orlando Business Journal has named Suneera Madhani, Worth co-founder and Chief Evangelist, to its 2026 Most Influential Leaders list. Ten leaders made the class, chosen through peer nominations from Central Florida executives and an editorial review.

A first-generation Pakistani-American founder, Suneera built Stax Payments into a billion-dollar platform and became the first female CEO to lead a unicorn out of Florida. Ask her what drives her work, and she points to something close to home. “This city gave my family everything, and I’d rather reinvest that here than take the opportunity somewhere else,” she told OBJ.

Suneera has built two fintech companies in Orlando and who is now helping Worth bring faster, clearer credit decisions to the financial institutions that serve small businesses. Small businesses anchor local economies, and women-owned, minority-owned, or immigrant-owned businesses often face a harder path to capital, partly because traditional measures reward credit histories they have had less opportunity to build. Worth was built to give those businesses a fairer read.

Worth has grown alongside that mission. The team grew over 50% in 2026, and its Winter Park headquarters grew 74%. Recognition like Suneera's helps the next hire, the next customer, and the next founder in Central Florida see what is possible.

A merchant's-eye view of payments

Suneera grew up working in her parents' small businesses, and she came up with the idea for Stax while selling credit card machines out of the trunk of her Volkswagen Beetle. Nearly every owner she met had the same complaint. They paid a percentage of every sale plus fees they couldn't decode, so none of them knew what accepting cards really cost. When she pitched flat, transparent subscription pricing to the company she worked for, they laughed her out of the boardroom.

She built it anyway. Stax grew past $140 million in annual recurring revenue and a valuation over $1 billion, and it earned a place among America's top-10 fastest-growing fintechs. The advantage was perspective: industry veterans looked from the inside, and she looked from the merchant's side of the counter. 

Why she started again

After nine years of working with small businesses at Stax, Suneera saw a new problem. Credit decisions for small businesses leaned too heavily on a founder's personal credit score and not enough on a real picture of the business. She and Sal Rehmetullah, now Worth's Co-Founder and CEO, had lived it themselves when they applied for credit to grow Stax. A consumer can get approved for a credit card in minutes on a phone. They filled out long applications, chased down documents, and repeated information that already existed elsewhere.

Worth is the company they built to fix that. The platform consolidates onboarding and underwriting for financial institutions that support small and medium-sized businesses. Its patented Crosswalking Technology matches a business across sources such as Secretary of State filings, IRS records, and Google, so an institution starts from a verified identity instead of reconciling mismatched records by hand. In August 2026, Worth launched Decision Intelligence, which returns an explainable decision on a small business application in real time, starting from as little as a business name.

Building in Orlando, on purpose

Stax helped put Orlando on the map as a fintech hub, and Suneera has watched that momentum grow. At Worth, the goal is to keep building the local talent pool so the next great fintech founder doesn't think she has to leave town to find it. In March 2026, Worth closed a $30 million Series A led by American Express Ventures and Fulcrum Equity Partners, with participation from TTV Capital, and the capital has gone straight into growing the team here.

She also spends time with the women building businesses across the region. "Orlando has incredible female founders," she said, "and the more we show up for each other, the stronger the whole ecosystem gets." That belief runs through her work beyond Worth. She hosts CEO School, a top-100 podcast, and founded the Millionaire Founders Club to help women scale past $1M in revenue, a mark that fewer than 2% of female founders reach. She is also an angel investor in more than 40 companies. 

How she leads

Suneera describes a leadership style built on a simple observation: nobody handed her a seat at the table, so she learned to build one. She now builds them for her team, and she wants each one to mean something. "The best ideas at Worth don't come from the top down," she said. "They come from the people closest to the problem." She also believes in being direct and would rather deliver a hard truth early than let someone discover it later, and she expects the same in return.

The advice she offers future leaders is just as plain. 

"There's no such thing as a billion-dollar idea, only billion-dollar execution, and people underestimate that." — Suneera Madhani, Worth Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist

It traces back to her father, who built multiple businesses and, when she was deciding whether to start Stax, looked at her and said, "Why not you?"

The whole Worth team is proud to see Suneera recognized alongside the other 2026 honorees. Read her full OBJ profile and check out the 2026 Most Influential Leaders list.

Congratulations, Suneera!