Founders: Daniel Yoon, Riley Janjis, Darryl Luo
Three guys quit their jobs, left their degrees behind and booked a one-way flight to SF. When they made the leap they had no customers within their target market, yet one thing remained constant: the ability to win. Now they've been backed by the best funds in Australia and accepted into Y Combinator. The story of Daniel Yoon, Darryl Luo and Riley Janjis is one of competition and an unshakeable conviction to win, born from a popular mobile game of all things. The craziest thing of all is that they're all only 21.
Before Forward, Daniel ranked first in law at UNSW across his entire grade, and ran a tutoring business with Riley that did $150k+ in revenue. Darryl was co-founder of his ed-tech startup Lima AI, which had just come off a 10x increase in revenue in early 2026 supporting over 5,000 language students globally. In the first few weeks of starting Forward, they made 200+ cold calls a day and maxed out their LinkedIn outreach every week. Riley alone cold-called about 400 brokerages in the company's first weeks. Daniel responded with extreme urgency to tackle any business problem head-on to unblock his team. Darryl shipped a working version of the product in a single weekend when Riley called for him as the third co-founder, having been childhood friends. And the numbers speak for themselves: $180k in annualised revenue in their first 2 months of building. This is a team with a clear directive. Win at all costs and stop at nothing.
It all started with a simple thesis: private credit is one of the largest and fastest-growing asset classes in the world, yet the market is still fragmented and painfully manual. Forward was born to change this. Riley saw firsthand how dire this problem was working inside Rixon Capital. They took this insight and obsessed over the problem day-in and day-out. Now Forward is on a mission to automate private credit origination. Debt advisors and private equity sponsors submit borrower documents, and Forward gives them access to the most suitable private capital partner in minutes. Funds managing a cumulative $20B in assets globally already use the platform, with over $100M in deals originated through it. Until recently, matching a borrower to the right lender meant weeks of emails, spreadsheets and phone calls. AI can now read a stack of borrower documents in minutes, and Forward was early to see what that meant for private credit. Forward is growing 50% week-on-week, onboarding 50+ US private credit funds and processing $300M+ in deal volume across the platform.
More impressive than the numbers and traction is the team's ability to execute even against the unknown. In the first weeks, they were newcomers to the industry and had little understanding of what their wedge was. They coined the term "e-barbing" from the game Clash of Clans. In the game, there are elite barbarians whose job is to run at the enemy and hack away with swords. No strategy yet sheer determination. It became the name for Forward's approach to AI in the very early days. They knew AI had the ability to disrupt the private credit industry but hadn’t figured out how to capitalise on it fully. So they hacked away aggressively until something stuck. At first it didn't work but eventually it clicked and the snowball grew exponentially. Riley called Darryl to join as CTO to bolster the technical domain. He was already building a successful company of his own, but Riley did whatever it took to win him over. It got to the point they were replying to Darryl texts within two minutes. Riley knew this would be a winning play and he was proved right. In his first week, Darryl built the first working version of the product.
There's not much more to be said on the Forward team. If you were playing poker, this is the hand to play at the table. Startmate is beyond excited to back young ambitious founders who will change the world in interesting ways. Forward is showing all the signals that they're on track to do so. The market is ready, the timing is right and the team looks battle-ready.
