Meet The Latino Entrepreneur Who Aims To Transform A Trillion Dollar Market

A few years ago, Edrizio De La Cruz had a great idea: a better way for émigrés to send money back home by reducing the friction caused by middlemen (the incumbent service providers). The idea catapulted the Dominican Republic-born Wharton grad into the higher echelons of the startup world, landing him onstage at Demo Day for Y-Combinator's class of 2013. He then secured $3 million in funding, which -- as my good friend Tiq Chapa at the Stanford Latino Entrepreneur Initiative has said-- is one of the few real VC scores for Latino entrepreneurs "east of the Mississippi." Regalii, his company, is based in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan, one of the largest hubs in the world for Dominican émigrés.