Provider of APIs for financial infrastructure, Plaid, closed a $250 million Series C round. The company’s founders, Zach Perret and William Hockey, discussed the funds in a blog post today, along with Plaid’s plans to “reinvest in the fintech ecosystem,” an industry they say is “just getting started.”
The investment, which boosts Plaid’s total funding to $310 million, comes with celebrity endorsement from Mary Meeker. Meeker led the round and will join the company’s board of directors. Additional investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Goldman Sachs, NEA, and Spark Capital.
“Plaid has built an important underpinning for financial services on the web and mobile. Plaid allows businesses to rapidly launch innovative products, drive growth and enhance consumer satisfaction. We are excited about the evolution and potential ahead,” Meeker said.
The San Francisco-based company will use the funds to onboard new employees and expand its operations. “We’re focused on shipping and scaling products that will both serve the growth and scale of these customers, and become the foundation for fintech for decades to come,” the founders said in the blog post. “Every company is becoming a fintech company…. Plaid’s role is to empower these innovators with a platform—and a data network—that delivers access to the financial system.”
TechCrunch, which pinned Plaid as a company to watch in 2019, reported that Plaid is now valued at $2.65 billion. This is up significantly from the company’s last valuation in 2016, which sat at $200 million after Plaid’s $44 million Series B round.
At FinDEVr San Fransisco 2014, Perret gave a presentation about leveraging the Plaid API for financial infrastructure. Since then, the company has grown to 175 employees and offers six products, including Auth, an account authentication tool; Balance, which pulls account balance information in real-time; Identity, which leverages bank data to verify consumer identity; Transactions, which pulls bank statement data across banks; Assets, a verification of assets tool; and Income, a tool that validates a consumer’s income and verifies direct deposit data.
This May, Plaid launched in Canada– its first international market. The startup also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to help the bank make a move toward open banking by enabling account holders to safely share their financial data with third party fintech applications.
Specifically, ayondoPRO clients will be able to trade more than 2,000 instruments with leverage of up to 200 times. Participants can also join a Spread Rebate Program that gives clients part of the spread they have paid back to their trading account. And professional traders don’t need to sacrifice ayondo’s standard benefits such as negative balance protection and free additional insurance that covers each Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) eligible customer up to $1.3 million in excess of the FSCS standard.
