Legal

Payna

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

Payna is building the AI licensing agent for regulated companies. We automate the filings, renewals, amendments, and regulator follow ups required to get licensed and stay licensed across jurisdictions, so teams no longer have to manage compliance through spreadsheets, email threads, and expensive outside firms. Starting with financial services categories like lending, debt collection, and money transmission, Payna helps companies move faster, stay compliant, and scale without adding compliance headcount linearly.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08

Founders & team

Previously Paena

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

Aaron Chen

Founder/CEO

Worked as a product engineer at an a16z backed DeFi startup helping scale crypto products, then went on to win ETHGlobal New York and ETHGlobal Delhi while earning recognition from Business Insider and the Ethereum Foundation. After building in crypto and seeing firsthand how painful manual licensing and compliance workflows are for regulated companies, now building Payna to automate regulatory licensing and ongoing compliance.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

He Song

Founder/CTO

Founded and scaled a company at a $15M valuation as a freshman, then launched a token at $60M. Built a crypto lending product at Berkeley, spent months inside multi-state licensing workflows doing it manually. Now building Payna, automate regulatory licensing.

Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
2team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yeardocumentation observedrecent publishing observed