“Lockup-end Day” is an important date in the Restive calendar. It’s the day – often years into the future – when a founder’s obligations to their acquirer end. And when Randy Fernando sold Power to Marqueta in 2023, we put it on the calendar for a couple of years later. And when the day came, we called: it was time to start working.
It’s safe to say we were his very, very first call.
A bit of history: Restive was the first committed investor in Power, the cloud-native card issuance platform Randy Fernando co-founded in 2021. Two years later, Marqeta acquired the company in one of the largest fintech acquisitions of 2023. Randy took Power from founding to a $300m cash exit in a bit under two years, on the back of a seed round, and he did it in one of the hardest markets in financial services: selling infrastructure.
So when he told us what he was building next, going after one of the biggest prizes in all of financial services, we did not hesitate. We went all in, writing our largest initial check in the firm's history.
Randy’s next company is Maximum, and it is aimed at what is, literally, the most entrenched layer of the banking stack: the core.
The core is a bank's system of record. Every account, every transaction, every ledger entry runs through it. At most American banks, it is a sometimes-decades-old monolith sold by one of a small handful of vendors, wrapped in contracts that run five to ten years, (or more). It is the digital version of the double-entry accounting system pioneered by the Florentines, 800 years ago. For many banks, it is just as antiquated.
In a world where money moves in real-time, the system traps banks in a morass of development windows, testing environments and dependencies that makes it hard for them to compete. Banks know the rails need to be rebuilt. But, without a credible alternative, "modernization" has mostly meant migrating to a newer version of the same thing from a similar vendor.
However, in a world of AI agents, dynamic data and universal access to information, the current core architecture is likely to cause many of them to fall into obsolescence and failure. Moving from incumbent to incumbent is not an option. (If the stock price is any indication, it appears that two largest incumbents, FIS and Fiserve, might beat their forlorn customers to the corporate graveyard.)
Maximum is building the solution; an AI-native banking core from the ground up. An AI-first architecture instead of a monolith; operations that run 24/7/365; automation of the manual work that consumes bank back offices today; and a clear philosophy on deployment: full migration enabled by AI in days to weeks, rather than years.
No more process mapping. No more multi-year deployment timeline, no armies of third party consultants hanging around the office. Maximum is building the AI infrastructure to allow today’s smartest banks to be the market leaders of tomorrow.
The economy is changing. AI will transform banking. And Maximum is helping the best banks make the leap.
But the real reason we invested in Maximum, was why we put his exit date on our calendars. Randy has a unique capacity to build world class teams of hungry obsessives. At Power, with a small team and far less capital than the competition, he convinced CEOs to trust a startup with mission-critical infrastructure, and then he delivered. He is disciplined about product and relentless about exceeding what he promises. Founders like Randy are rare. When you have work with one, you don’t squander it. You mark your calendar. You show up on time. And you get ready to work.
We’re ready to work.
© 2026 Restive®, Inc.
