Accounting finance ops

Palus Finance

Website

Overview

After a fundraise, you want to focus 100% on scaling your company, but suddenly there's a mountain of finance and ops decisions you need to figure out. Though these tasks feel like distractions, making the wrong decisions here can literally kill your company.

Palus is your startup's financial advisor. We help you with the decisions that come with scaling: where to store your cash, how to think about runway, and how to optimize your company’s finance/ops setup.

Palus will save you dozens of hours on operations work, help you avoid making financial mistakes, and our cash management service can earn you $100s of thousands in extra yield on your fundraise without switching banks or taking on unnecessary risk. And you can reach us 24/7 via Slack.

What makes us an advisor and not another bank or finance tool is that we're an actual fiduciary, not a product with a salesperson attached. Mercury, Rho, and Brex can't legally give you financial advice; they hand you a dashboard and leave the decisions to you. Palus signs an advisory contract with you, giving us a legal fiduciary duty to act in your company’s best interest. This lets us give you actionable financial advice and optimize your cash to best suit your goals and company’s needs.

Sam and Michael are technical cofounders who met at Caltech. Sam previously built the AI research platform for a $3T AUM asset manager; Michael built quantum computers for the defense industry.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
LinkedIn
Accounting finance opsCopilot & assistantBusinessesSmall businessesServices

Founders & team

Sam Lushtak

Founder/CEO

CEO @ Palus Finance. Used to manage cash for Fortune 500 companies, now I do it for startups. Ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-Capital Group. Caltech alum. Sharpe ratio enthusiast.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Michael Gonzalez

Founder/CTO

CTO @ Palus Finance. Distributed systems nerd. Previously wrote monitoring software that saved defense contractors $150M by optimizing uptime of multi-site fleets of quantum computers. Caltech alum.

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

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Hacker News · Y Combinator

Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedNot documented
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Launched · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The company website offers product access through a trial, free start, app download, purchase, or onboarding with existing-account login. Customer adoption is not established by this evidence.

Company website: home Checked 2026-09-16

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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 peoplerecent publishing observeddated product or funding activity
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method