This Seasoned Fintech Founder Raised $52 Million to Create an “Intentional Commerce” Ecosystem
While many startup founders begin as engineers, product builders, or early-stage operators, John Howard took a very different path. His entrepreneurial journey began in unexpected places—the structured, high-stakes world of investment banking and private equity.
Eventually, John transitioned to building startups. Today, he is the founder of Croissant , a fintech-enabled commerce platform that is rethinking how consumers shop, earn value, and make purchasing decisions.
The road to founding Croissant was shaped by years of observing financial systems, building companies from within private equity, and identifying opportunities where technology—and increasingly AI—could transform consumer behavior.
This is the story of how John went from growing up in a book-loving household in Boston to helping build billion-dollar investment strategies at KKR, and ultimately launching a startup aimed at reshaping modern commerce.
Growing Up Between Books and Opportunity
John’s story begins in Valladolid, Spain, where he was born. However, Spain was only the starting point of his journey. His parents returned to the United States when he was just three months old, and he grew up in Boston.
John’s upbringing was deeply influenced by his parents, both of whom were educators. As a result, the household environment revolved around curiosity, reading, and intellectual exploration. Growing up in Boston’s inner city and attending public schools shaped John’s early worldview.
Education played a central role in his life, and that foundation led him to Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Interestingly, Vanderbilt wasn’t initially an obvious destination for him. The idea came from a favorite English teacher who encouraged him to apply, believing it would be a strong fit.
That teacher turned out to be right. At Vanderbilt, John not only received an excellent education but also met someone who would play a pivotal role in his personal life—his future wife. The two began dating during college and have since built a life together.
Looking back, John's senior year at Vanderbilt was particularly memorable. Because he had already secured a job offer after graduation, he used his final year to explore intellectually rather than to focus strictly on career preparation.
John asked friends which professors were the best on campus—regardless of subject—and filled his schedule with those classes. As a result, he found himself studying everything from art history and Russian literature to geology and astronomy.
It was a year dedicated to curiosity and exploration before entering the demanding world of finance.
Entering the High-Stakes World of Investment Banking
As John reveals, he took a “somewhat formulaic track out of school.” He did a standard summer analyst investment banking program while at Vanderbilt. He recalls interviewing with recruitment agents on the campus as a 21-year-old, dressed in a tie and suit, and landing the job.
After graduating from Vanderbilt, John began his professional career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a summer internship program. Like many ambitious finance graduates, he entered the leveraged finance team—one of the most demanding and active desks on Wall Street. The role was intense.
Long hours, tight deadlines, and last-minute demands were part of the daily routine. It was common for senior bankers to request entirely new presentations just minutes before major calls with clients.
Despite the pressure, John describes the experience as invaluable, as he was invited back full-time.
As a 22-year-old analyst, John was suddenly sitting in rooms with CEOs, management teams, and investors, making critical decisions about mergers, acquisitions, and capital structures. Watching how they financed their business and returned capital to shareholders was a huge privilege.
For someone from a family of educators who had not previously been exposed to the financial world, it was a remarkable learning experience. Rather than simply surviving the workload, John treated the role as an opportunity to absorb as much knowledge as possible.
He paid attention to how deals were structured, how executives made decisions, and how capital flowed through global markets. That exposure would later prove crucial for his entrepreneurial journey.
In retrospect, John remembers being impressed by Graham and Dodd and the Howard Marks letters on value investing. He loved the ethos of matching patterns and putting capital behind conviction, and wanted to get an investing role, being especially drawn to special situations investing.
Moving Into Private Equity at KKR
As is the standard practice, three months into the job, John recruited for private equity and hedge fund roles. Private equity firms had started calling, and he started taking interviews. He joined KKR, one of the world's most prestigious investment firms.
At the time, KKR’s credit and special situations business was still developing. The firm was expanding its focus beyond traditional buyouts to include distressed loan portfolios, public securities, private credit, and emerging financial platforms.
At 24, John joined the special situations team in 2014. For a young investor, the role offered extraordinary exposure. The team evaluated opportunities across asset classes, geographies, and industries.
The idea here was that banks had been major credit providers to small businesses and consumers in ways that existed pre-crisis but didn't exist post-global financial crisis. Private capital was increasingly moving into that space. Where the banks used to be, there was now a gap and a void.
KKR could buy companies and loan portfolios in that void and start things. John had been doing just that in the two years he had been at the firm. But in 2016, it doubled down by formalizing it and raising a big fund around it.
Building a $2.25B Investment Strategy
In 2016, KKR hired a new partner, Dan Pietrzak, to lead the initiative. John was invited to move to London as Pietrzak’s first hire for the strategy. Together, they launched an inaugural $2.25B specialty finance fund.
At just 26 years old, John found himself responsible for deploying a massive pool of capital across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the United States.
He ultimately played a role in deploying roughly half of the fund’s capital, focused on opportunities where traditional financial infrastructure was inefficient, outdated, or broken.
As John recalls, even during his time at KKR, he was inspired to be a builder and participate in companies from their inception. A few projects he handled fueled his builder mentality and spirit, helping shape the founder in him.
As John points out, the interesting thing about the specialty finance fund they raised is that the mandate is very sector-specific. It was all financial services, but it was stage agnostic. It included the earliest-stage operating platforms to stage publicly listed companies and everything in between.
Within that sector, John was looking at a new space and strategies to play the investment thesis. One particularly compelling opportunity emerged in the UK auto lending market.
Building Companies From Scratch Inside Private Equity
In the United States, auto lending is typically supported by large dealership networks and competitive financing options. But in the UK, the market looked very different. Small dealerships often relied on intermediaries and brokers who charged significant fees.
As a result, borrowers who could borrow at maybe 5% in the US were paying interest rates as high as 15%—far above comparable loans in the U.S. Rather than simply acquiring an existing lender, John proposed building a new company from scratch.
Investing in the Concept and Materializing it
KKR initially invested £30M ($39.71M)to start the business, through a combination of operating equity and asset funding. Over the next five years, KKR deployed £230M ($304.45M) in equity to scale the company into the leading non-bank auto lender in the UK.
The company eventually grew to more than 600 employees and generated hundreds of millions in revenue. For the first six months, John worked closely with the leadership team—effectively embedded inside the company as it launched.
This hands-on experience was unusual for a private equity investor but profoundly influential for John. In the initial six months, he lived inside the business alongside the CEO, the Chief Risk Officer, and the gentleman responsible for winning dealer partnerships—the first three hires.
It awakened the builder mindset that would eventually push him toward entrepreneurship.
Repeating the Playbook in the U.S.
John recalls how he got hands-on experience in building a business, which was unusual for an investor. Typically, investors are not involved this closely with their investment portfolios. But for John, it was a fantastic experience to bring the project to life as a mid-20s person.
John later replicated this “build-from-scratch” model in the United States. He helped launch Toorak Capital Partners, a platform focused on residential transition loans—financing for real estate investors who renovate and flip homes.
These loans differ from traditional mortgages because they support short-term property projects rather than long-term home ownership. As John points out, borrowers don’t take 30-year mortgages to buy a house they intend to sell within a year.
It's a commercial-purpose mortgage backed by the home's value, with a draw capacity to complete projects. Like the auto lending business in the UK, the market lacked modern infrastructure.
John partnered with an experienced mortgage executive who had previously built a similar platform for Blackstone. Together, they launched Toorak and scaled it rapidly. Once again, John approached the investment committee and obtained the first check for the new platform.
KKR ultimately invested $500M of equity into the business, which became the largest capital provider and technology platform in the residential transition loan space.
John recalls traveling from his home base in London to cities across the US, such as Greenville, South Carolina, and Denver, Colorado, and selling these originators on why they should use Toorak’s tech, operate a capital stack, and build from scratch.
Toorak quickly became the largest provider of capital operations, services, and tech to the specialist mortgage space in the US—a great success story. These experiences reinforced John’s passion for building companies rather than simply investing in them.
Helping Transform KKR Itself
After several successful years in London, John moved back to New York. At KKR, his strong performance led to another major opportunity: helping shape the firm’s long-term growth strategy. By this time, he had been with KKR for more than seven years.
John joined the corporate development team at the general partner level and helped lead one of the most significant acquisitions in the firm’s history. He helped KKR think about expanding as a firm to become bigger and better at what it did.
KKR acquired Global Atlantic, a large insurance company that brought roughly $150B of assets under management into the firm. The acquisition fundamentally changed KKR’s business model by dramatically expanding its permanent capital base.
Following the integration of the acquisition, John returned to a more traditional investment role, focusing on fintech and payments investments. He led FinTech and related payments investing out of the North America buyout fund during his last 18 months at the firm.
It was during this period that the idea for Croissant began to take shape.
The Idea Behind Croissant
Throughout his career as a fintech investor, John had always been in financial services and fintech-focused, living in New York and London and investing across the world. He noticed a pattern.
Most financial innovation focused on the liability side of consumers’ balance sheets—helping people borrow money more easily through credit cards, loans, buy-now-pay-later products, and other funding mechanisms.
Very little innovation and funding was happening on the asset side. Croissant was designed to change that. Rather than encouraging impulse consumption through debt, Croissant promotes what John calls “intentional commerce.”
The idea is simple: encourage consumers to buy higher-quality products that retain their value over time, are more rewarding to own and purchase, and are a better financial choice.
Croissant aims to educate and reward customers for making the right decisions by working with great partners across all sectors.
How Croissant Works
Croissant operates as a digital ecosystem that connects consumers with premium brands. Users can earn Croissant credit in two main ways. From reselling items they own, and from earning 10% rewards while shopping with partner brands.
This benefit becomes material to shoppers, as they spend $700 per checkout, translating into $70 of incremental credit credited back to their account every time they shop.
These credits can then be used to shop within Croissant’s network of premium retailers. Some users accumulate hundreds or even thousands of dollars of universal Croissant currency in credit, creating a powerful incentive to shop within the platform’s ecosystem.
Croissant’s value-added services bring in a uniquely high-value, luxury, or premium shopper. The company has created a dense database of ideal shoppers for the types of brands it works with.
It also empowers them to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars, thanks to the 10% reward and the payments for their resale activity. John reveals that people’s accounts now hold $160M in collection value, and they are looking for places to spend it.
Brands can install the Croissant checkout widget to take advantage of that spend. So now brands are increasingly installing Croissant as a checkout option, allowing consumers to come and spend with them.
The Business Model
Croissant generates revenue through several mechanisms. First, the company earns affiliate commissions when users shop with partner brands. When users come to take their credit and shop at its partners, it gets attribution for sending that customer to them.
Second, Croissant provides brands with a unique financing option. Because it can predict future purchase volume from its user base, it sometimes pre-purchases future revenue from brand partners.
For example, Croissant might estimate that $3M of purchases will occur through its platform over the next year. The company could pay the brand $2.1M upfront in exchange for those future purchases, earning a spread on the transaction.
When brand partners participate in that pre-funded revenue, Croissant makes a larger spread on the store credit discount at which it was purchased. This structure provides brands with non-debt capital while giving Croissant a profitable financial position.
Financing the Business
Croissant’s model is capital-intensive. The company purchases inventory from users who sell items on the platform and pays them in store credit. Although Croissant has refined the system, capital is tied up for a few months while the platform owns the items and liquidates them.
As John underscores, that's only a small part of the business. At any given point in time, a few million dollars are outstanding. The larger chunk of capital intensity relates to the credit Croissant pre-purchases from brands, buying upfront the right to future revenue.
This pre-purchased revenue can add up to millions, or, for some larger brands, tens of millions. To support this structure, Croissant uses a mix of equity capital and asset-backed lending facilities to generate the working capital it needs to cover costs.
So far, the company has raised over $52M in combined debt and equity financing.
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The Vision for Croissant
John’s long-term vision is to build a ubiquitous commerce network of the best brands and retailers, where Croissant, as a redemption option, is everywhere. In this future, Croissant becomes a standard checkout option across premium retailers.
Consumers earn and redeem Croissant credit across a broad ecosystem of brands—from luxury fashion houses to high-end retailers. Instead of buying impulsively and accumulating debt, consumers would make more intentional purchases while being rewarded financially.
John explains that at Croissant, they are attempting to build a worldwide network in which every premium shopper thinks more intentionally, chooses higher-quality items, and adopts the intentional commerce mindset Croissant is trying to pioneer.
Lessons for Founders
Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, John emphasizes two key lessons. First, startups are always harder than they appear. Many founders begin their journey believing their vision will unfold quickly. In reality, building a company often takes far longer than expected.
Second, humility is essential. John recalls a conversation with a successful founder who once joked that he made “80% wrong decisions.” The point wasn’t literal accuracy but perspective.
If a company takes 10 years to build but could theoretically be built in two years with perfect hindsight, then most decisions along the way were imperfect. The key is learning quickly and adapting.
John encourages young founders to channel the fact that they don’t know everything and that they’re about to learn a lot.
Final Thoughts
John Howard’s journey illustrates how entrepreneurship can emerge from unexpected backgrounds.
From investment banking to private equity, from billion-dollar funds to startup building, each stage of his career contributed to the mindset that ultimately led him to found Croissant.
By combining financial insight, operational experience, and AI-driven technology, Croissant aims to reshape the relationship between consumers, brands, and value creation in modern commerce. And if John’s career trajectory is any indication, the journey of building Croissant is only just beginning.
John Howard’s path to entrepreneurship began in investment banking and private equity rather than the typical engineering or startup background. · His time at KKR exposed him to inefficiencies in financial infrastructure, shaping the investment insights that later inspired his startup ideas. · Building companies from scratch inside private equity gave John hands-on operational experience that awakened his builder mindset. · Launching and scaling platforms like the UK auto lender and Toorak Capital proved that technology could modernize outdated financial markets. · Croissant was born from the observation that fintech innovation focused on consumer debt rather than helping consumers build asset value. · By combining AI, resale-value insights, and rewards, Croissant promotes “intentional commerce” in which consumers buy higher-quality items that retain their value. · John’s biggest lesson for founders is that startups take far longer than expected and success requires humility, rapid learning, and constant adaptation.
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: Already, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have a very exciting story, a story where we're going to be learning about, you know, how to transition from private equity to the world of startups, thinking about problems, you know, really when it comes to the application of AI, also in the process in that journey. We're going to be talking about building, scaling, financing,
Alejandro Cremades: All of the good stuff that we like to hear. him So without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, John Howard. Welcome to the show.
Alejandro Cremades: So originally born out of all places in Spain, in Valladolid, obviously a place that is dear to my heart.
Alejandro Cremades: So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, John?
John Howard: Life is good. Unfortunately, I don't remember Spain very much because I was three months old when my parents went back to the U.S.
John Howard: I grew up in Boston. um my My parents were both educators, and so I grew up in a household that loved books. I grew up in the inner city in Boston. I went to public school for most of my years and then found my way down in Nashville, of all places, for college at Vanderbilt University, thanks to a favorite English teacher of mine who encouraged me to apply and thought it would be a good fit for me.
John Howard: She didn't know how right she was. I met my future wife there. we dated in college, um you know. jumped off into a career that I've loved. It was a great experience. And, you know, the start of everything we're going to talk about today.
Alejandro Cremades: That's amazing. now Now, for you, after university and and going to Vanderbilt, there was quite some shifts in your professional career and how you ended up landing in private equity because you went from Bank of America, i mean, Merrill Lynch, to then essentially hedge funds and then landing in KKR, which was pivotal for you.
Alejandro Cremades: how did you How did you go through those motions and and what needed to happen to go from from one to the other?
John Howard: Yeah, you know, interestingly, Alejandro, my story is not probably that typical for a founder because I so i took a somewhat formulaic track out of school. So I did the standard summer analyst investment banking program while I was at Vanderbilt.
John Howard: The typical thing where people come on campus to recruit and you show up in a suit and tie as 21 year old pretending you know what you're talking about. And I landed a great role in Bank of America Merrill Lynch's leverage finance team, which is between them and JP Morgan always competing for the most active desk on the street for leverage finance transactions.
John Howard: ah so I had a good summer internship program. I got invited back full time. Was fortunate to come into senior year at Vanderbilt knowing that I had a job on the other side, um which was a lot of fun, made senior your year really special.
John Howard: One of the things I did during that senior year that I recommend to a lot of young people who ask me is I reached out to all my friends who I who i respected academically and said, who's the very best professor you took during your time here? doesn't matter what subject.
John Howard: I want to just take the very best professors for my last two semesters here and make the most of this experience. so I ended up taking art history classes and Russian literature classes and the geology course and astronomy and really just embraced that last year. i kind had fun with it since I knew i was going off to Bank of America afterwards and cemented my relationship with my girlfriend at the time, who's now been my wife of 11, coming on 12 years. So, you know, kind of ideal senior year.
John Howard: Went back to to be of A and joined the Lev Finn team. Awesome experience. As bad as people describe right in terms of hours and stress and the MD who would call me eight minutes before a call with the management team and say, i actually need seven new slides, like get them ready. And then we'd get on the call and he'd say, I don't know what's taking my colleagues so long, but we'll have those to you soon.
John Howard: um That said, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I would go back and do it 10 out of 10 times. Loved the team there. The exposure was phenomenal. I had so many deal toys stacked up on my counter or back in my apartment that my wife made me throw out like 90% of them when we got married and said, you can keep two or three favorites. But you know it's a great way to get exposure. Phenomenal first step in a career as a 22 and 23-year-old, being in the room with those decision makers, with the management teams of large companies, thinking about their capital structure.
John Howard: and making pivotal decisions on M&A and on how they finance their business and return capital shareholders is a huge privilege. I just tried to soak it all in and through osmosis, just be in those conversations and make sure that I was on those calls and in the rooms. Um, so very grateful for that experience, probably, you know, coming from a family where my parents were educators, didn't really fully know what I was getting myself into, but ended up jumping all the way into the deep end and embracing it. Um,
Alejandro Cremades: If I was to bring you back in time, maybe to the point where you were thinking about giving your notice at KKR and really about to take that jump off the cliff and figuring out, as they say, building the plane on the way down, if you were able to have a chat with that younger John and give that John one piece of advice before launching a business, what would that be and why?
John Howard: Two things come to mind. One is that great old sign that you'll see online that some people have in their office that says, we didn't do this because it was easy. We did it because we thought it would be easy. That often comes to mind for me.
John Howard: I definitely, like many founders, left with a bent towards optimism on how quickly we could assemble the big vision.
John Howard: And telling my younger self to be patient and roll with all the twists and turns would have been a core piece of advice. The second thing is, probably on the humility side, I heard a really great quote that I don't fully agree with, but I think is kind of a funny, provocative framing. I was at a founder dinner in San Francisco a couple years ago, and the keynote speaker said, he was a very successful multi-time founder with multiple unicorn exits, and said, I make 80% wrong decisions.
John Howard: Wrong decisions. And we all kind of looked around. There was a chuckle in the room. He goes, no, I'm serious. If you look at any of my companies, what do they take? Ten years to get from nothing to the successful point where I would consider it as having made it.
John Howard: Well, if you look back on that company, you'd say, hey, knowing what I know now, I could have built that thing in two years, not 10 years. Therefore, it took me an extra eight years. I make 80% bad decisions and only 20% good decisions. So I love that lens. It's not necessarily true, but it shows you that humility, that ability to adapt quickly,
John Howard: the awareness going in that you don't know everything, you're about to learn a whole lot, is the other thing that I would encourage young founders to channel before they go and make the leap.
Alejandro Cremades: I love that. So, John, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out, say hi, would love to perhaps take a look and learn more about Croissant, what can you tell them?
John Howard: I tell you first and foremost, get on the iOS store and download our app. It's a very rewarding experience. As you heard in my overview, it's multifaceted, it's complex. It's not a point solution, it's an ecosystem. And it's a little tricky to understand sometimes, frankly, but as you get into it, you realize more and more how powerful and rewarding it is, both financially, but then also in terms of the quality of products and brands that it introduces you to and what you'd end up discovering and falling in love with.
John Howard: So I tell you to do that, and then don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn if I can be helpful in any capacity.
Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, John, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.
John Howard: Likewise, Alejandro. It has been great. Thanks for having me.
