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Pre-Launch · Filing seed · Series A — Q4 2026

Founder · Chief Executive

Mitchell McLennan.

Founder and chief executive of Wavestar Holdings. Former CTO and chief product officer of Centili Group, where he built and operated the payments infrastructure that connects 280+ mobile carriers across more than seventy jurisdictions. Structured-finance background. Neutral between the space industry and the financial system — which, for the kind of institution Wavestar intends to be, is a prerequisite.
Role
Founder · CEO
Based
New York, NY
Contact
mitch@wavestar.space
Prior
Centili Group · CTO/CPO

The operating thesis

Why this person, for this company.

Wavestar is a piece of regulated market infrastructure being built by someone who has already shipped regulated payments infrastructure across seventy jurisdictions. That is not coincidence — it is the only background from which the target institution is buildable on a two-year timeline.

The standard founder path for a space-adjacent company is aerospace engineering first, business second. The standard founder path for a clearing house is capital markets first, technology second. Wavestar sits at the intersection of both disciplines — and the work is built on the conviction that neither path alone is enough.

The background the company needs is someone who has run transaction rails in production, who has survived a regulated operating environment across multiple jurisdictions, who understands structured finance without being captured by it, and who has the engineering depth to build the primitives rather than assemble them. That combination is rare by accident. Wavestar exists because it happens to be available on purpose.

Mitchell is actively operating other ventures alongside Wavestar — that plurality is by design. The day-to-day discipline of running a multi-jurisdictional payments business keeps the operating muscle warm. The clearing house cannot be built by someone whose only exposure to regulated infrastructure is theoretical.

The right founder for a clearing house is not the person most excited about the technology. It is the person most willing to sit inside the boring parts of the regulatory discipline for a decade.
Wavestar Research·On founder-market fit

Career

What has been built, and where.

  1. 2026In progress

    Wavestar Holdings LLC — Founder, CEO

    Wyoming-incorporated clearing, settlement, and truth layer for the orbital economy. Four modules — ORCH, Terminal, Market, Attest — on a shared identity registry. Seed-stage. Regulatory filings on four tracks (FinCEN, SEC, CFTC, SEF/DCM) running in parallel.
  2. 2018 – presentIn progress

    Centili Group Ltd. — CTO, CPO, founder-operator

    UK telecom payments group. Direct-carrier-billing and alternative-payments infrastructure across 280+ mobile carriers and 70+ countries. Responsible for product and engineering across the platform. Active operational role continues in parallel with Wavestar.
  3. VariousComplete

    Serial venture operator across payments, AI, and gaming

    Founder and operator across additional ventures in agent infrastructure, alternative payments, gaming, and digital-content distribution. The common thread is infrastructure — tools that sit below applications and connect heterogeneous participants.
  4. EarlierComplete

    Structured-finance and capital-markets operating experience

    Institutional capital-markets exposure that predates the technology ventures. This is the discipline that the clearing house requires — risk waterfalls, collateral optimisation, default management, the rhythm of regulated infrastructure.

How he works

Operating cadence.

  • 01

    Documentation-first

    Every consequential decision is written down before it ships. PRDs, ADRs, runbooks — the paper trail is the institution. Wavestar's architectural decision log is public-by-default at docs/decisions/.
  • 02

    Multi-jurisdictional by default

    US-based with active operating history in the UK, EU, and LATAM through the Centili payments network. The operating muscle for cross-jurisdictional regulated work is already warm — which matters, because Wavestar's first year is a cross-jurisdictional year.
  • 03

    Engineering-capable, not engineering-captured

    Technical enough to design the primitives and interrogate the implementation. Institutional enough to never mistake the implementation for the institution. The two roles exist in the same head, but they are kept deliberately distinct.
  • 04

    Regulatory patience

    A clearing house is built by someone willing to spend years in the slow-moving parts of a regulated operating environment. The comfort level is already established — the Centili operating history covers licensed payments across the UK, EU, and LATAM.

Facts

Quick reference.

Founder specifications

Full name
Mitchell McLennan
Role at Wavestar
Founder · Chief Executive Officer
Based
New York, United States
Active in
United States · United Kingdom · EU
Contact
mitch@wavestar.space

Direct inbox. Expect a reply within one business day for serious enquiries.

Public speaking
Selective

Routed through press@wavestar.space. Regulator briefings and member-facing events take priority.

Board seats
Centili Group · Wavestar Holdings

Other board and advisor relationships disclosed in the governance register.

Direct line

Open a conversation.

The fastest way to reach Mitchell is to say something specific and serious in the first three sentences. Counterparty introductions, regulator outreach, senior hires, and investor conversations are all welcome.