Stelrix CEO Colin Sahagun on democratizing portfolio-backed liquidity, building real-time risk rails, and redefining how investors spend without selling.
Colin, could you tell us what inspired you to start Stelrix and how your early experiences with finance shaped your vision for the company?
I grew up watching money work very differently for different people. On one side I saw friends and family juggling credit cards, loans and random fees. On the other side, when I started working in finance, I watched high-net-worth clients quietly borrow against their portfolios, access huge amounts of liquidity and never touch their core investments.
One day I asked why everyone couldn’t do that. The answer I got was basically, “It’s too complex for the average person.” That stuck with me. Stelrix really started from that moment. If the system only works for people with private bankers, then the system is the problem.
The Stelrix Card allows users to access portfolio liquidity in real time without selling assets or triggering taxes. What were the biggest challenges in developing this innovative system, and how did you overcome them?
The hardest part wasn’t the idea, it was getting everyone around the table to believe the rails could actually support it. Banks, networks, processors, regulators, etc. They are all trained to protect against anything that looks new in credit but there has not been one challenge with Stelrix that I thought was unsolvable.
We had to prove three things: that our risk engine was reality not fantasy, that we weren’t trying to reinvent banking law and that this could fit inside existing rails without blowing anything up even with our new stack. That meant over-building the infrastructure, letting our bank and compliance partners poke holes in every assumption and being okay with saying no to features that were “cool” but not safe until we really mapped them by the cell.
On the technical side, building real-time collateralization that actually works at card speed is non-trivial. We solved that by treating risk as the product, not a back-office function. The card experience is the visible layer; underneath it is a dedicated system that only cares about pricing risk, protecting the portfolio and making sure every single authorization can be justified. Our system really is unprecedented in the way it communicates with almost our main umbrella of infrastructure itself while also connecting back to partner functions.
How does Stelrix make private-bank-level financial tools accessible to everyday investors, and what impact do you hope this has on financial inclusion?
Private banks already offer portfolio-backed lines, but they are slow, paperwork heavy and completely disconnected from everyday payments. Stelrix collapses that into something as simple as tapping your card at a restaurant.
The minimum “requirement” isn’t millions in a managed account. It is being a serious investor who wants to stay in the market while still having a life with eligibility being as little as 20K invested in a brokerage account. By automating the underwriting and tying it directly to your live holdings, we can offer the same underlying process that the top one percent gets, just without the phone calls and gatekeeping.
We give a whole generation of investors a new way to access liquidity without constantly sabotaging their future selves. That is a different kind of inclusion and not just access to credit, but access to credit that doesn’t quietly erode your long-term wealth. We bring idle capital in markets back into the real economy while also increasing market participation at once.
As a 21-year-old founder navigating investors, partnerships, and regulatory challenges, what has been the most surprising aspect of leading a fintech startup?
The most surprising thing is how human it all is. You walk into fintech thinking it is going to be numbers and models. In reality, everything at this level runs on trust, timing and whether people believe you are going to keep your word when things get hard, we and our partners are very big on trust and delivering what we say is possible.
Being young doesn’t help or hurt by default. It just means people are testing if you actually know your space or if you’re just excited. Once they see that you’ve done the work, that you understand the downside cases better than the upside, age becomes less relevant even with that small group that may continue to invent things just because they don’t want to believe a 21 year old is doing something they wish they could. It shouldn’t matter, end of story.
The other surprise is how emotionally expensive it is. You’re building something that almost nobody has a mental template for, and you’re doing it in a heavily regulated environment. There are days that feel like ten steps forward, then one email takes five of them back. You have to genuinely love the mission or you would never keep going. I genuinely believe that this company will change the way every American spends for the better and anyone who disagrees, we’re simply not aligned and that’s okay.
How do you see the integration of investing and everyday finance evolving over the next five years, and what role will Stelrix play in this transformation?
Right now people treat investing and spending as two separate worlds. You have your brokerage app “over here” and your credit card app “over there.” That separation is artificial. It exists because legacy systems weren’t built to talk to each other in real time.
Over the next five years that wall comes down. Your “card” is just going to be a front end on your balance sheet. The question will shift from “What is my credit limit?” to “How do I want my assets to support my life this month?”
Stelrix is aimed to be the infrastructure that quietly powers that for investors. The first expression is our own card, but long term I see Stelrix sitting behind other brands, other institutions, letting them offer investment-backed spending without rebuilding everything we’ve already built. This product is one of many we have developed or have mapped on a global scale.
The Stelrix Card relies on intelligent, dynamic collateralization executed in real time. How do you ensure reliability, security, and scalability for everyday users?
We design the system with a very boring principle: protect the downside first in worst case conditions. The engine takes live portfolio data, runs it through models and rules that our bank partners have vetted and then applies hard guardrails before any decision hits the network. If something doesn’t look right, a sudden volatility spike across the dozens of KPIs we track, concentration risk, or simple abnormal behavior, the system tightens limits or flags it before it becomes a problem accordingly or proactively.
On reliability and scale, we keep the architecture modular. The risk engine is its own service, the card processing is another, and we have clear choke points where we can throttle, fail over or override. It means we can scale usage without losing control of risk in an interchangeable system, we’ve done that purposely so we don’t ever have the lag that current legacy systems have.
Security is non-negotiable. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we only use what we actually need for underwriting and servicing. We aren’t in the data-selling business and we couldn’t be if we wanted to the way it’s built with tokenization and privacy mitigations. Our value is in the decisions we make on behalf of users and partners, not in mining their information and trying to tell them exactly what to do in any regard.
What strategies have been most effective in building a compliant and scalable ecosystem with banks, payment processors, and infrastructure partners?
We started with the assumption that we are not smarter than banking law. Instead of fighting the system, we asked, “How do we plug into it in a way that feels new to users but familiar and safe to partners?”
That meant bringing in heavyweights early from sponsor banks, compliance firms, legal counsel, processors and letting them be co-architects with view instead of just vendors. When a bank or a network sees their fingerprints on the design, they lean in harder and they are much more comfortable approving edge cases later.
We also try to align incentives very clearly. Everyone involved benefits when the program performs well and risk stays low. No one wins if we chase growth at the expense of stability. That alignment is what lets a small team like ours stand on the shoulders of a very large ecosystem and truly lead a novel category.
Do you plan to expand Stelrix’s offerings to other asset classes beyond traditional portfolios, and if so, which ones and why?
Yes, but the order matters. We are deliberately starting with listed equities and diversified funds because the data is clean, the markets are liquid and the risk is straight forward to price. From there, the next natural step is broader index products and potentially other highly liquid, transparent assets where we can build conservative models including crypto and even collectibles such as certain pieces of art.
Longer term, I do believe any productive asset should be able to support intelligent credit if it is modeled correctly and the rails exist. That could mean different types of portfolios, new wrappers, eventually even real-world assets through partners. The constraint won’t be imagination. It will be, “Can we stand in front of a regulator and a risk committee and defend this structure in a bad year?” If the answer is no, we go back and start again with the structure.
What lessons have you learned about bringing a highly innovative and unconventional fintech product to market, especially when it challenges traditional financial norms?
The main lesson is that you cannot skip the “translation” layer. People rarely say no because something is bad. They say no because they don’t have a mental box to put it in. Our job has been to take a new category and explain it in language that sits one step away from what people already understand.
I’ve also learned that you need to know your own weaknesses better than your critics do. When an investor or a regulator points out a real risk and you say, “We’ve thought about that, here is the mitigation, here is where the model breaks,” you earn trust quickly. When you hand-wave it, the conversation is over.
And finally, you have to get comfortable being early. By definition, if you’re building something like this, some people will think it shouldn’t exist. That’s fine, I don’t care and I know what we’re going to do and how large of an impact Stelrix will make. The job is not to convince everyone; it is to find the ones who see the same gap you do and build relentlessly for them but more importantly with them.
What advice would you give to young founders looking to innovate in highly regulated and complex industries like fintech?
Honestly my first advice is do not do it unless you feel like you do not really have a choice. I did not wake up one day and decide that building a regulated credit product was a fun startup idea and it didn’t come out fully formed either. This specific problem and this specific solution got stuck in my head and it would not leave to the point where I became obsessed. I kept feeling that if I didn’t do it, it would either never exist or it would be done in a way that missed the entire point. At that stage it stopped being a career move and started feeling like something I had to do in a mission sense.
If you are just looking for a company to start, a space like fintech will drain you. The rules, the committees and the slow, yes will make you quit. The only thing that gets you through is being genuinely obsessed with the product and convinced that you are supposed to be the one who carries it across the line. When it gets hard you have to go harder, not pull back. You lock in, tune out the noise and keep moving. That kind of tunnel vision is the only reason Stelrix is real right now and why we have done more in seven months than most seed stage fintechs manage in twenty four.
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