Reported by Kevin Dowd, Jonathan Ponciano and Hank Tucker
Corporate credit cards. Home improvement loans. Funding for online creators. Checking accounts for small businesses. The past several years brought a proliferation of startups offering tech-fueled banking services for other companies—and aiming to shake up the fusty banking establishment in the process. The space is now home to so many noteworthy companies that Forbes has added business-to-business banking as a new sub-sector for this year’s edition of the Fintech 50.
The debut class of B2B banking companies includes ten names. Some are emerging powerhouses with valuations north of $10 billion. Some are relative upstarts still trying to make their mark. One is led by two twentysomething Stanford dropouts. One is led by a longtime solar-energy executive. One is led by a husband and wife. But all are using software to transform the way businesses large and small manage their banking, their funding and their finances. Here they are:
Brex
Growing suite of banking products includes flagship corporate credit card with no account fees, travel rewards and built-in expense tracking, and an FDIC-insured corporate cash management account. Both services are accessible on an online dashboard that also offers expense-management software and enables businesses to pay their bills. Launched lending service in August geared toward venture-backed tech companies, and made its biggest acquisition yet in April—spending $90 million on a software startup to help users with budgeting and financial projections.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $1.2 billion from Y Combinator, DST Global, Kleiner Perkins and others
Latest valuation: $12.3 billion
Bona fides: Tens of thousands of customers, including ClassPass, Airbnb and Carta.
Cofounders: Co-CEOs Henrique Dubugras, 26, and Pedro Franceschi, 25, launched Brex after dropping out of Stanford.
Clearco
Funds ecommerce startups via revenue-sharing agreements plus a 6-12% fee. Investments range from $10,000 to $20 million. “Blind funding” algorithms help generate term sheets in 20 minutes, and accompanying software helps clients track metrics like revenue and ad campaign performance. Funds nine times more racially diverse founders and 25 times more women founders than the average venture capital portfolio. Clients include viral eyelash company Glamnetic and period-proof underwear-maker Ruby Love.
Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
Funding: $600 million from SoftBank, Oak HC/FT, Sozo Ventures and others
Latest valuation: $2 billion
Bona fides: Has deployed more than $3.2 billion into some 7,000 firms, with client base nearly doubling last year.
Cofounders: CEO Michele Romanow, 36, and executive chair Andrew D’Souza, 37, former romantic partners with vast experience as executives in the Canadian tech industry.
Column
Tech-focused, federally chartered bank that aims to replace the patchwork of financial services providers that fintech digital “banks” (that aren’t technically banks) need to partner with. Offers services like holding customer deposits, processing bank-to-bank transfers, running wire transfers and lending. All built around the nucleus of a one-branch national bank in Chico, California, with $300 million in deposits, which the founders bought last year for $50 million.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $50 million plus from husband-and-wife cofounders
Bona fides: Already counts Brex, Plaid and debit card startup Point as customers.
Cofounders: Co-CEO William Hockey, 32, a billionaire who cofounded Plaid in 2013 and sold some of his Plaid shares to finance Column; Co-CEO Annie Hockey, 32, a former Bain consultant and Stanford MBA.
Creative Juice
This startup aims to become a key financial cog in the creator economy with a two-pronged strategy. One prong is a digital banking app designed specifically for creators. The other is a service to help some YouTube and other creators grow their online businesses by providing capital infusions of $25,000 to a half-million in exchange for a share of their revenue.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $20 million from Index Ventures, Acrew Capital, Inspired Capital and others
Bona fides: Creative Juice formally launched in November and is already valued at between $75 million and $100 million, according to sources close to the company. Its backers include MrBeast (95 million YouTube subscribers), former NFL star Larry Fitzgerald and Twitch cofounder Justin Kan.
Cofounders: CEO Sima Gandhi, 39, a veteran of Plaid, AMEX and the Obama Treasury; Ezra Cooperstein, 42, president of Night, a creator management company.
GoodLeap
Its platform and app have funneled $13 billion in financing to about 380,000 homeowners making green home upgrades—half of that just within the past year. Contractors and vendors use GoodLeap’s point-of-sale app to get their customers’ loans instantly approved; partner banks, including Goldman Sachs, make the loans and then securitize the debt to sell to investors, using its software to track loan performance. After starting with solar panel loans, last year GoodLeap expanded to more than 20 categories of sustainable improvements, including battery storage, energy-efficient windows and water-saving turf.
Headquarters: Roseville, California
Funding: $1.6 billion from New Enterprise Associates, WestCap, Michael Dell and others
Latest valuation: $12 billion
Bona fides: Its app is now used by more than 18,000 home-improvement businesses, up from 12,000 at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: Chair and CEO Hayes Barnard, 50, and Chief Revenue Officer Matt Dawson, 48, two longtime executives at SolarCity (now Tesla Energy); and Chief Risk Officer Jason Walker, 48, a veteran mortgage broker.
Mercury
Digital banking platform for startups, offering no-fee checking and savings accounts, debit cards, wire transfers and currency exchange. Its $15 million in 2021 revenue came primarily from interchange on debit card transactions and a share of interest on deposits. But in March, it expanded into venture debt–term loans for up to four years, typically for between 25% and 50% of a recent (within the last 12 months) equity funding round. Mercury, which charges interest and takes a warrant to buy a small amount of stock, aims to lend out $200 million this year.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $152 million from Coatue Management, Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and others
Latest valuation: $1.62 billion
Bona fides: Customers grew fourfold to 45,000 in 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Immad Akhund, 38, sold mobile advertising startup Heyzap to Fyber for $45 million in 2016; COO Jason Zhang, 31; CTO Max Tagher, 30. Both Zhang and Tagher worked for Akhund at Heyzap.
Modern Treasury
Back-end payments software used by more than 100 enterprise customers, including Marqeta, ClassPass and BlockFi, to move money in and out of bank accounts through wire transfers, ACH and Real-Time Payments transactions. Customers pay a monthly $499 fee plus 10 cents and 0.1% per transaction, or can negotiate a custom annual fee. Its add-on products can track transactions and balances in multiple currencies, including crypto, and direct payments into virtual sub-accounts of linked bank accounts.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $183 million from Altimeter Capital, Benchmark, Y Combinator and others
Latest valuation: $2.1 billion
Bona fides: Now moving $3 billion a month, up 200% from $1 billion a year ago.
Cofounders: CEO Dimitri Dadiomov, 37; CTO Sam Aarons, 29; chief product officer Matt Marcus, 28; the three met working for real estate lender LendingHome (now Kiavi).
Novo
Aiming to replace the big banks as the go-to provider of checking accounts and other banking services for small businesses. The company took a slow and steady approach: It was founded in 2016 but didn’t launch until 2018, taking time to build its app from scratch instead of relying on third-party APIs and getting by on under $7 million in seed capital (and a federal PPP forgivable loan) until mid-2021, when it started raising serious expansion funds.
Headquarters: Miami, Florida
Funding: $135 million from Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital and others
Latest valuation: $700 million
Bona fides: Novo’s customer base swelled from 24,000 to 140,000 in 2021, as it capitalized on a burst of small business creation in the U.S.
Cofounders: CEO Michael Rangel, 35, former head trader at Fairholme Capital Management; CTO Tyler McIntyre, 30.
Pipe
Proprietary trading platform allows businesses to raise money by selling recurring revenue streams to hundreds of institutional investors. Revenue streams are anonymized and packaged together according to risk profile, with an average return in the mid-single digits. Sellers, ranging from startups to publicly listed firms, have raised billions of dollars on the platform since its debut in June 2020, including $1.2 billion last year. In September, Pipe expanded outside the U.S., launching in the United Kingdom.
Headquarters: Miami, Florida
Funding: $315 million from Craft Ventures, Stepstone, Fin VC and others
Latest valuation: $2 billion
Bona fides: Counts more than 12,000 sellers including software, subscription and streaming service firms—ballooning eight-fold in one year.
Cofounders: Co-CEOs Harry Hurst, 32, and Josh Mangel, 29, who started a Los Angeles car-rental company that was acquired in 2018; and CTO Zain Allarakhia, 29.
Ramp
Corporate credit card offering unlimited 1.5% cash back on all purchases and a free expense-management platform that uses machine learning to flag wasteful spending, which Ramp claims helps an average customer shave 3% off expenses each year. Slew of product launches over the past year include bill-pay feature, travel booking service and integrations with Amazon Business, Lyft and Gmail.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $1.37 billion from Founders Fund, Stripe, D1 Capital Partners and others
Latest valuation: $8.1 billion
Bona fides: Founded in 2019, Ramp has picked up more than 5,000 clients—including Clubhouse, Marqeta and Planned Parenthood—who’ve made about $5 billion in transactions over the past year.
Cofounders: CEO Eric Glyman, 32; CTO Karim Atiyeh, 32; and chief product officer Gene Lee, 31, longtime friends who started Ramp after selling an online savings startup to Capital One.
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