The UCLA Dropout Who Turned Your Group Chat Into a Wallet

There is a moment most people recognise: the end of a meal, a round of drinks, a shared taxi, and the quiet but loaded pause that follows. Someone paid. Everyone else knows it. And yet, more often than not, nothing happens.

Founder Josh Steiner spent two years turning that pause into a company.

Steiner grew up in London, enrolled at UCLA, and left before finishing his degree, not out of aimlessness, but because he had already found the problem he wanted to solve. EmberPay, the fintech startup he co-founded, is building what he describes as a fundamentally different way to pay for things together: not through after-the-fact reimbursements, but at the point of sale, in real-time, using an existing chat as a joint-payment method in place of a debit or credit card.

Finding a Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

Steiner began building EmberPay alone, while still enrolled at UCLA, with no payment background and no industry contacts. What he had was a clear sense of the problem and the willingness to manufacture his own access.

The decision to build in San Francisco and not London was deliberate. Steiner had identified the American college campus as the ideal environment to launch a joint-payments product, a place where the use case occurs multiple times daily and where users are social enough, and financially constrained enough, to care about solving it properly.

His co-founders came not from accelerators or LinkedIn introductions, but from his own life. Micah Thomas, now COO and Head of Growth, was Steiner’s roommate at UCLA, present for the earliest version of the idea and close enough to understand both the opportunity and the founder pursuing it. Thomas describes his decision to join as straightforward: “I decided to build a solution to a problem I faced constantly. To me, this seemed like a no-brainer.” Charlie Baker, EmberPay’s CTO, was a secondary school friend from London who entered the picture later, and less conventionally. Steiner pitched him at their five-year reunion.

“I literally pitched him at our five-year high school reunion,” Steiner recalls. “10 days later, he flew to San Francisco with me to get started on this thing.”

Assembling the Team

The friction of splitting bills is not a new complaint. What was missing was any serious attempt to measure it: to understand precisely where and why people gave up trying to solve it.

Steiner’s early research began with conversations, talking directly to potential users about how they actually behaved when a shared expense came up. He and the team quickly realized people weren’t simply forgetting to ask for money back. They were making an active, if unconscious, calculation: the social awkwardness of requesting reimbursement, combined with the logistical effort of doing so, consistently outweighed the value of the amount owed.

According to EmberPay, a survey of roughly 500 college students put that number at approximately $12. The company says any IOU below that threshold tends to be written off by whoever paid, the friction of recovering it feeling disproportionate to the reward. Steiner was not surprised by the finding, but having a concrete figure changed what the team could do with it.

And while college students were a good case study for initial research, Steiner points out that this problem doesn’t stay on campus. The same behavioural calculus plays out everywhere people pay together. “The current process necessitates that one person fronts the purchase at the point of sale and then takes on the responsibility of deciding if they want to be reimbursed, and then seeking that reimbursement,” he explains.

The Pivot That Made EmberPay Work

EmberPay’s original concept was a joint credit card, a shared financial instrument that two or more people could use together at the point of sale. The logic was sound: no shared credit history, no liability for a friend’s separate purchases, and no post-payment chasing. On paper, the risk was contained.

In practice, the response was immediate and consistent: people didn’t want it. The concept of a joint card, however well-structured, triggered a kind of instinctive resistance that no amount of rational explanation could overcome. Users heard “joint card” and thought about shared debt, about entanglement, about what happens if something goes wrong.

The team went back to a more basic question. What do people already share with everyone they would ever want to split a bill with? The answer wasn’t a card, a bank account, or a financial product of any kind. It was a chat.

Describing the new model, Steiner says, “What if instead of having a joint card, we just let you pay for things with your chats? That’s a digital asset you already have with all your friends that you’re very comfortable having.”

By repositioning the payment object from a joint financial instrument to a messaging thread, EmberPay aimed to reduce much of the implied risk of a shared financial product. In practice, this means that when a user goes to pay at the point of sale, they open the mobile wallet and select a group chat instead of a debit or credit card. The payment is completed by one user, and the transaction is automatically shared with the group, allowing members to contribute their share directly. The conversation the user already has becomes the mechanism through which the payment moves, requiring no new accounts, no new cards, and no new relationships to establish.

Executing that vision at the point of sale only became possible when Apple opened its NFC stack (the technology underpinning tap-to-pay) to third-party developers, giving startups access to infrastructure that had previously been locked to Apple’s own ecosystem.

According to the company, building a mobile wallet that operated natively at checkout wasn’t necessarily viable before that change. The pivot from joint card to group chat had always been the right answer; Apple’s decision made it a buildable one. “That variable change has completely shifted the goalposts and has allowed us to create what we believe is a mass improvement on a solution to solve joint payments,” Steiner says, “which is just an incredibly rare thing to be able to do in a core consumer industry.”

A Platform Built to Scale

The company reports having secured 80,000 waitlist signups in seven weeks, and the platform is already thinking beyond the college campus. The immediate focus is on perfecting the point-of-sale experience, and the team says they’ve brought the time it takes a group to split a bill down significantly from the current industry norm, but the longer-term ambition is to make EmberPay the default way any group of people manages shared spending, from a dinner between two friends to a holiday among ten.

As Thomas, who is largely responsible for the platform’s growth, explains, “Making sure we’re building a program that is not only frictionless and social, but also compliant is a daily balancing act, especially when modern-banking standards are outdated and rigid.”

The chat-based architecture is designed to scale with that ambition: because the payment object is a messaging thread rather than a financial product, there is no ceiling on how many people or how many contexts it can accommodate. “I see EmberPay’s future as a very broad joint marketplace, where anything ‘pay-together’ is technically and visually supported by EmberPay chats,” Charlie Baker explains.

What gives that vision commercial weight is the structural position EmberPay occupies relative to its larger competitors. Other platforms were built for a world in which the point-of-sale moment had already passed, and their existing architectures make it extraordinarily difficult to retrofit the kind of real-time, split-at-checkout functionality that EmberPay is building from the ground up.

To sum up EmberPay’s long-term goal, Steiner’s words are simple: “We want shared payment methods to be as essential and ubiquitous in relationships as chats or calls.”

For a 24-year-old who taught himself an industry, assembled a co-founding team from his secondary school and university friendships, and saw an opportunity to try to solve a long-running problem, Josh Steiner is showing through EmberPay that the distance between identifying a problem and actually solving it is mostly a question of patience and savviness.