Village Global Podcast Recall Sessions: Itai Damti on Embedded Finance and the Art of Getting Your First Customer
Feb 23, 2026
Itai Damti, Co‑founder and CEO of Unit, which builds embedded finance infrastructure for accounts, cards, and money movement. He recounts building in stealth, landing the first customer via LinkedIn, and why embedded finance beats old‑school fintech. He explains buyer types, a feature‑prioritization color framework, and the tricky gap between early adopters and the mass market.
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Why They Built Unit Before The Market Knew It
- Itai Damti and Doron Somech spent six months ideating and launched Unit in 2019 to make it easier for software companies to offer accounts, cards, money movement, and capital.
- They bet embedded finance would shift from FinTech 1.0 to software platforms (Shopify, Uber, Toast) extending into financial services and built an opinionated platform to serve that wave.
Embedded Finance Beats Banking As A Service
- Embedded finance was the clearer demand-centric umbrella term compared with banking-as-a-service, which felt supply-centric and reductive.
- Itai preferred 'embedded finance' because many products (wallets, capital, loans) didn't map cleanly to traditional banking constructs.
When To Build Before You Sell For New Infra
- If you change market norms with infrastructure, build first when early validation is hard, then iterate toward product–market fit.
- Unit accepted the bet that novel infra needs a working system to attract early adopters rather than immediate sales.