As Deborah Barta, senior vice-president of innovation management and startup engagement at New York-listed payment services provider Mastercard, said in her nomination: “Amy Neale, Mastercard’s vice-president and global leader of startup engagement program Start Path, has earned the right to be named a Rising Star.”
Barta added: “Launched in 2014, Start Path is Mastercard’s award-winning startup engagement program that brings together a network of innovators from across the globe to create breakthrough solutions and create the future of commerce. Start Path provides startups with operational support, commercial engagement and the opportunity for strategic investment. Startups also benefit from the knowledge of a global network of Mastercard experts, technologies and channels.”
Together with her global team, Neale designed the Start Path Global program and established startup engagement centres for Mastercard in Dublin, Dubai, New York and Singapore. By setting up a corporate membership model for Start Path, she developed a global fintech ecosystem involving a diverse portfolio of 180 startups.
Some of the startups in which Neale invested include series A rounds for US-based conversational artificial intelligence software developer Kasisto in 2016, Australia-based cross-border payment technology supplier Airwallex in 2017, and US-based consumer finance platform developer Divido in 2018.
Subsequent to receiving her doctorate in computational linguistics at Cardiff University, she began her career in academia, where she worked with researchers on commercialisation strategies. This eventually led her to the startup space and she joined the founding team of Ireland’s first startup accelerator program, NDRC.
