Tyler Spalding

Tyler Spalding is the President of the Acronym Foundation and the Co-founder of Flexa, the developer organization behind Ampera, a grassroots payments initiative, anchored by the AMP collateral token. He also serves as Founder and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Mendako Group, a technology investment firm. He was appointed President of the Acronym Foundation in January 2023, focusing on building open-source Web3 projects including Anvil and Ampera.

Education

Spalding attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering and then he got a Master's degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical, and Astronautical Engineering from the same university in 2002.

He earned an MBA, Cross Registration from Harvard Business School in 2010, and afterward, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA), Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Career

Tyler Spalding began his career as a Software Engineer at Microsoft and later held engineering and research roles with the United Space Alliance, the United States Air Force, and at NASA on the Space Shuttle Program and the Constellation Program.

In 2009, Spalding served as the Senior Engineer, NASA Constellation Program / Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, and then as a Researcher at MIT until 2011.

He co-founded Tastebud Technologies in May 2011 and served as the CEO leading the company to be acquired by Raise in 2015. After the acquisition, Spalding served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Raise.com until 2018. He went on to found two additional e-commerce startups (three total across his career), including Tastebud Technologies.

He co-founded Flexa in 2018 alongside Trevor Filter, Zachary Kilgore, and Daniel McCabe (who also served as CEO). He served as Co-Founder of Flexa, which has been described as the largest pure-digital payments network.

He is based in New York, NY.

Flexa

Flexa is a platform that offers omnichannel digital asset payments and is the company behind Ampera, a grassroots payments initiative that uses Amp as a digital collateral token. The Flexa Capacity contract is a collateral manager that uses Amp to collateralize the payments of merchant locations across the US and Canada. Users stake Amp in exchange for rewards funded by the merchant fees.

He has spoken publicly about the importance of strategic partnerships in digital payments, citing Flexa's collaboration with Lightspark as an example.