Steve Schultz

Steve Schultz is a fintech investor and operator with more than 20 years of experience across financial services, digital payments, and financial infrastructure. He began his fintech career at Yahoo! Finance, where he held general management and senior product-line roles, and earlier worked as a product manager at Epiphany. He went on to become Chief Operating Officer of Check, a mobile payments/bill-pay service, where he led product, strategic partnerships, and merchant go-to-market from the company's inception through its acquisition by Intuit.

After Check, Schultz moved into the venture and platform side of fintech. He joined the fintech investment team at F-Prime Capital as a Venture Partner, focusing on financial services and technology companies and drawing on his operating background to source and support fintech and software startups. He also spent time at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he led AWS's partnership with Y Combinator and helped build out the AWS Startups business.

In May 2023, Schultz joined Diagram (a Sagard company) as a Partner on its fintech team, announced alongside Diagram's third fund — Diagram Ventures III, which raised over $100 million (exceeding its target) to validate, launch, and scale fintech and web3 companies and to back externally created early-stage startups. At Diagram he concentrates on seed-stage payments and fintech-infrastructure investments and serves as a board director for several portfolio companies.

He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BA in Economics from UC Davis.

• Invests primarily at seed and Series A, with check sizes reported in the ~$100K–$10M range (sweet spot ~$5M).
• Deep specialization in payments, fintech, and financial infrastructure — the areas where he operated as COO of Check and invested at F-Prime.
• Also active in data infrastructure, software, and consumer internet, reflecting his product/GM background at Yahoo! Finance.
• Brings an operator's lens: he built product, partnerships, and go-to-market at Check through its Intuit acquisition, and led platform partnerships at AWS (including Y Combinator), so he tends to back founders solving concrete payments/infrastructure problems.
• At Diagram, works within a venture-studio + fund model that validates, launches, and scales fintech companies in addition to investing in externally founded startups — signaling comfort with very early, sometimes pre-formation, fintech bets.