Michael Wu

Evanston, IL · AI · financial infrastructure · early-stage venture

Michael Wu

I build and invest in the AI infrastructure to make finance accessible — safely.

MMM (MS/MBA) candidate at Northwestern. Operator turned early-stage investor — ex-Citi, ex-Wiz (acquired by Google). I ship AI-native products and back the infrastructure making consumer finance safe at scale.

Read the thesis

About

I work where AI, infrastructure, and financial access meet. My bet: AI will open up financial tools that used to be gated — but only if we build the agentic infrastructure and controls to do it safely.

I've shipped product and strategy where money and trust are on the line — technology and partnership strategy at Citigroup, and product & program management at Wiz (acquired by Google).

Today I invest in early-stage AI and fintech-infrastructure companies at Sentinel Global and Illuminate Financial — and I build AI-native products myself, because the best way to understand what founders are building is to build alongside them.

The thesis

What I'm betting on

The consensus is that AI will put a financial advisor in everyone's pocket. I think that's the easy half. The hard, valuable part is the infrastructure underneath — the agentic rails, permissions, and controls that make it safe to hand real money to software.

01

Access is arriving.

AI collapses the cost of advice, analysis, and execution. The gates that kept sophisticated financial tools locked to institutions are falling.

02

Infrastructure is the hard part.

A chatbot on a bank API isn't the product. The product is the agentic infrastructure underneath — orchestration, permissions, guarantees.

03

Safety is the moat.

In consumer finance, trust is the product. The winners will be defined as much by what they prevent as by what they enable.

It's the lens I invest through at Sentinel and Illuminate — and the reason I build. See what I've built , or read the field notes .

By the numbers

Traction, not adjectives.

$ XXX M+

technology portfolio owned

Citigroup

$ 6 M

revenue unlocked

Wiz — vendor strategy

230 %

headcount growth supported

Wiz

75 %

faster procure-to-pay

Wiz

48 h

full-stack app, built end-to-end

AI-native build

Experience

The path so far.

Jun 2026 – Present · New York, NY

Illuminate Financial

Investor

Specialized capital-markets VC; LPs include the largest US banks.

  • On the investment team, evaluating early-stage fintech and capital-markets-infrastructure companies.

Mar–Jun 2026 · San Francisco, CA

Sentinel Global

Investor

Multi-stage VC backing category-defining companies.

  • Evaluated early-stage companies across AI, cybersecurity, and fintech.

Mar 2024–Jun 2025 · New York, NY

Wiz, Inc. (acquired by Google)

Product & Program Manager, Internal Tools

Agentless, multi-cloud cybersecurity.

  • Shipped a new procure-to-pay workflow — redesigning orchestration, role-based access, and approval routing — cutting task time 75% and freeing $3M in capacity.
  • Collapsed a 12-step manual procurement process into a 3-step AI-assisted flow supporting 230% headcount growth.
  • Pitched a vendor-consolidation strategy to the C-suite, unlocking $6M in revenue and $2M in savings.

Aug 2020–Mar 2024 · New York, NY

Citigroup

Technology & Partnership Strategy — Analyst I → Analyst II → AVP

  • Owned a $XXXM+ technology portfolio, defining build/buy/partner strategy across 6 business units and 400+ suppliers.
  • Led an enterprise digital-transformation program, defining data pipelines and validation logic and cutting operational cost 25%.
  • Supported the C-suite's response to a $900M operational error at the Board level, focused on data integrity and platform controls.
  • Automated reporting with Python, SQL, and Excel VBA, reducing report-creation time 60%.

Education

2025–2027

Northwestern University

MMM (MS/MBA) — Kellogg & McCormick

MBA + MS in Design Innovation. MMM Class of 2027 Co-President; Director of FinTech Careers, Kellogg KTech; K_AI (AI Club).

2016–2020

Lehigh University

BS, Integrated Business & Engineering (IBE)

Biophotonics Engineering and Finance.

Selected work

Thesis, shipped.

I build the kind of product I back — read the case for each like a deal.

Stratum

Flagship

Thesis

If AI is going to recommend financial strategies, something neutral has to safely manufacture and clear them — without ever picking sides.

Build

A neutral, agent-callable rail that turns any recommended payoff into a priced, decomposed, (mock-)cleared order — every caller hitting one public surface under identical auth, with a hash-chained audit trail and a hard stop at the regulated boundary.

Result

A runnable MVP of the rail: no agent gets a privileged path, and every mutating call is tamper-evident by design.

PythonFastAPIMCPOpenAPI

Agentic VC Diligence Platform

Thesis

A diligence memo isn't a document — it's a research pipeline. So build it like one.

Build

A multi-pass agentic system — plan → research → draft → critique → revise — that synthesizes editable investment memos from multi-source data and competitive intel.

Result

Turns days of manual diligence into a reviewable first draft: the tooling I use for the work I'm moving into.

PythonFastAPINext.jsLLM agents

Personal Wealth Management App

Thesis

People should own their whole financial picture — and see the fastest path out of debt — without a bank in the loop.

Build

A personal-finance app (SwiftUI + Plaid) that computes real-time net worth and optimizes debt payoff with avalanche and snowball strategies.

Result

A working iOS build that turns linked accounts into an owned, interactive plan.

SwiftUIPlaidiOS 17

More builds

5 more

Even more on GitHub ↗ .

Field Notes

Thinking out loud.

Field notes: what I look for in AI-fintech infrastructure

A short checklist from the diligence chair.

Access is the easy half

Everyone's building the chatbot. The infrastructure underneath is the real work.
Read all field notes →

Beyond the work

I go all in — and do it myself.

Whether I'm shipping code, riding across a country, or cooking a seven-course dinner from scratch — I don't do things halfway.

The supper club

I cook for the people I want in the room.

70+ dinners, all from scratch — Michelin-level, everything homemade. Hosting is how I think, build relationships, and unwind: the same obsession I bring to product, pointed at a stove.

Michelin-level Everything from scratch By invitation
Ask about the next seat at the table
70+ dinners

Off the clock, too

7 continents by end of 2026

Always chasing the next place I haven't been.

Two wheels

Rode across Morocco and Vietnam by motorcycle.

Ultimate frisbee

Team sport, no refs, all trust — my kind of game.