Education and Admissions

J.D., Northwestern University School of Law

B.S., Geology, Washington and Lee University

Admitted to the California Bar

Finlab Legal was founded by Rena Thiagarajan, a former entrepreneur and product, and transactional lawyer with nearly 20 years of experience in fintech, payments, e-commerce, and technology. Rena works at the intersection of creativity, legal strategy, and product execution, bringing clarity to ambiguity and solving hard problems with collaboration and imagination. She’s not a yes-or-no lawyer, but focuses on the how: offering creative design solutions early in the process, and helping companies move fast without compromising on foundational building blocks.

Rena has held senior legal roles at Shopify, Visa, Affirm, and Marqeta, supporting payments, money movement, prepaid, debit, and credit cards, financial accounts, business and consumer lending, loyalty and rewards programs and AI/ML data-driven services. She has helped drive strategy and design, advised leadership on risks to accelerate growth while maintaining compliance, and built and scaled legal frameworks, processes and playbooks to keep teams moving.

She was also the founder and CEO of a travel-focused e-commerce startup, Project Bly, launched in the early days of fintech. The company aimed to build a global marketplace for artisans in street markets around the world. The biggest challenge was payments and money movement. Her team integrated Stripe before it was mainstream, built a Ruby on Rails site from scratch, and navigated a labyrinth of regulatory and operational challenges before most platforms existed to support it.

The challenge of global money movement still drives her today. With over a billion adults worldwide remaining unbanked, making financial services fair, accessible, and transparent is work she cares deeply about.

Earlier in her career, Rena was a corporate lawyer at WilmerHale, where she focused on venture capital financings and M&A, and she also served as acting general counsel at AltaRock Energy, a venture-backed clean-tech company.