Tony Montes is Co-Founder and CTO at Zolvo, a YC-backed AI platform automating back-office operations for commercial lenders across the United States. He leads all product and infrastructure development, building the AI reconciliation engine that replaces manual, spreadsheet-driven workflows in the commercial lending industry.

Tony is a Systems and Electronics Engineer from Colombia who conducted AI research at Cornell, UIC, and CinfonIA, with publications at top NLP conferences ACL and EMNLP. He went on to become a founding AI engineer at Domu (YC S24), where he built voice AI infrastructure that scaled to 100K+ calls per day for enterprise fintech clients.

Tony holds deep expertise in generative AI, NLP, and multimodal agent systems, and recently secured his O-1 Visa as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability. His hands-on, execution-first approach drove Zolvo to its first paying client and $6,000 in revenue within just four weeks of committing to the company full-time.

At Domu (YC S24), Tony ran voice AI infrastructure handling 100K+ daily AI calls with zero churn, serving some of the most complex US fintech clients. He co-founded Zolvo in 2026 alongside Isabela Rodriguez, targeting the $4T+ factoring and asset-based lending industry still running on 1990s software.

Zolvo was accepted into Y Combinator's Spring 2026 cohort and secured $500K in funding, with over $1B in assets under management represented in its client pipeline. The platform promises more than 60% reduction in operational costs for commercial lenders, replacing teams of 14+ people with automated AI workflows.