Arpit Goel built his first company, Gamma, on a simple pitch: legacy data-loss-prevention tools took nine months to show value, and Gamma got customers there in two weeks. Palo Alto Networks acquired Gamma in 2021. Now Goel is running the same play in a completely different industry. Root is a payments orchestration layer that lets enterprises move money bank-to-bank in about five seconds, with no intermediary ever holding the cash. In this conversation, Arpit explains why he thinks the US is finally close to a tipping point on instant payments, why Root never takes custody of the money it moves, and how the company handles banks that can't yet receive instant payments.
What We Covered
Growing up in India, and the ADHD diagnosis that pushed him toward IIT Delhi
Why he calls himself an "ignorant" founder rather than an experienced one
The nine-months-to-two-weeks wedge that built Gamma, and why Root uses the same one
Discovering the payments inefficiency by reading through ADP's 10-K
Why 40% of US SMBs don't accept cards, and it isn't about the fees
The dual pressure of RTP and FedNow that made 2024 the right moment to start Root
The heart, arteries, and capillaries analogy for how Root fits into the banking system
What actually happens to money in the five seconds between sender and receiver
Why reliability, not transaction scale, is the hard engineering problem in payments
How Root handles banks that can't receive RTP or FedNow
Where stablecoins fit into a bank-rail-agnostic platform
Why Root wants to be the pipes underneath the industry, not the brand
Key Takeaways
SMBs refuse cards mostly because of settlement delay, not fees — restaurants earning their week's cash on a Saturday night don't see it until Tuesday, right when they need it most to restock.
Root never takes custody of funds. Money moves directly between the sender's and recipient's own bank accounts, and Root charges a fee on top rather than earning float.
Reliability, not transaction volume, is the hard engineering problem — Root has built retry and fault-tolerance systems, using the workflow engine Temporal, so a bank outage doesn't have to mean a failed payment.
Arpit sees instant payments as a market that hasn't tipped yet but is close — RTP and FedNow now operating together create sustained pressure that neither rail created alone.
About Arpit Goel
Arpit Goel is the founder and CEO of Root. He holds a computer science degree from IIT Delhi and a PhD from Stanford, and previously founded Gamma, a data-security company acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021, where he went on to lead product for the data-security business.
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