INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment last year, it left out a couple of key investors
Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa quietly participated in the round.For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers
to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way, having the blessing of two of the major credit companies in the world
It could signal that the startup intends to move more broadly into payments, although it didn’t make any specific assertion it was doing
that in the announcement.CEO and co-founder Zach Perret, writing in a blog post this morning, addressed the broad implications of having
“We’re particularly excited about what this means for our customers and consumers
As an industry when we come together with a shared vision for an ecosystem that is open, secure and encouraging of innovation the
possibilities are limitless,” he wrote.Plaid toolsPlaid helps developers connect to financial services in a similar way that Stripe helps
them connect to payments or Trello to communications tools
By having access to a set of tools from Plaid, developers can build into their applications access to bank information and other financial
data without having to have knowledge about how to connect to thousands of different banking systems.Former CTO and co-founder William
Hockey explained to TechCrunch what this meant in an announcement earlier this year:“Everybody in the U.S
can actually use this product now
And some of those [connections] are super quick and instant, and some of those maybe take a day to verify, but what we’re doing is we’re
wrapping all of that in the product
And so you as a developer, you don’t have to worry about all of the different authentication methods at some of these banks,” Hockey
explained.Plaid has raised more than $310 million since it launched, and that Series C investment last year carried with it a fat $2.65
Strategic investments of this sort show that the industry as a whole is behind a startup, and having Mastercard and Visa involved gives the
company additional credibility in the marketplace.
