First Round is a seed-stage venture firm focused on building a vibrant community of technology entrepreneurs and companies, including Uber, Square, and Warby Parker. Through custom-built software, incredible in-person experiences, and a host of other unique services, First Round helps tiny companies get big while constantly reimagining the role of venture capital. It offers a growing number of services and products to help founders build companies from scratch. First Round has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

First Round Capital

Upfront Ventures is proud to be an early investor and long-term partner to the most exciting founders and startups. Founded in 1996 in Los Angeles with investing professionals based in LA, San Francisco, and Paris, Upfront has backed standout teams across all technology sectors, including Ring (acq. by Amazon), TrueCar (NASDAQ: TRUE), Bird, Maker Studios (acq by Disney), GOAT, Apeel Sciences, thredUP, Invoca and Kyriba (acq by Bridgepoint). We invest about half of our capital in the fast-growing Southern California ecosystem, with the balance across the country as well as investments in Europe and Israel. Upfront Ventures is led by Managing Partners Yves Sisteron, Mark Suster, and Kara Nortman.

Upfront Ventures

Coatue is a privately owned hedge fund sponsor. The firm invests in the public equity markets globally focusing on investments in technology, media, and telecommunications in addition to other sectors. It employs a long or short strategy to make its investments.

Coatue

Primary Ventures is a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage financial companies. The firm facilitates the development of ventures that seek to strengthen the ecosystem of technological solutions linked to the world of markets and finance.

Primary Ventures

SemperVirens is an early-stage ecosystem fund investing in workforce technology, healthcare technology, and financial technology companies looking to solve employer needs. Its team members bring deep industry experience, relationships, and insights.

SemperVirens Venture Capital

Pareto Holdings is an early-stage investment vehicle founded by Jon Oringer and Edward Lando. We execute on dozens of investments per month and are often the first to back exceptional entrepreneurs. We are industry and geography agnostic, and specialize in pre-seeding companies. We’ve made 500+ investments to date. Unlike others, we only invest our own money with a small and mighty team around the world.

Pareto Holdings

Notable Capital is named for the founders we invest with, the ideas they pursue, the causes they champion, and the remarkable companies they build. Notable is a U.S.-based venture capital firm focused on early-to-growth stage companies in cloud infrastructure and business and consumer applications across the U.S., Israel, Europe, Latin America, and select go-global opportunities. Notable portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Block, Brightwheel, Drata, Handshake, HashiCorp, Ibotta, Orca Security, Quince, Slack, Slice, StockX, Stori, Vercel, Zendesk, and more.

Notable Capital

Indeed is an employment-related metasearch engine for job listings, available in more than 50 countries and 28 languages, and covering 94% of global GDP. With more than 140 million monthly unique visitors, Indeed has double the traffic of the next leading job site. According to a recent study, Indeed is the #1 source of external hire for employers (SilkRoad, 2013).  Since 2004, Indeed has given job seekers free access to millions of jobs from thousands of company websites and job boards. As the leading pay for performance recruitment advertising network, Indeed drives millions of targeted applicants to jobs in every field and is the most cost-effective source of candidates for thousands of companies. Founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, Indeed has over 800 employees with offices in Austin, Dublin, London, San Mateo, New York and Stamford.

Indeed

Franklin Resources is a global investment management organization known as Franklin Templeton Investments. They have an extensive global presence, including offices in 35 countries and clients in more than 150. Their common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BEN and is included in the Standard & Poor’s 500:registered: Index. Franklin Resources Inc. NYSE: BEN is an investment firm originally founded in New York in 1947 as Franklin Distributors, Inc. It is listed on the NYSE under the ticker BEN as in Benjamin Franklin, whom founder Rupert Johnson, Sr. admired. In 1973 the headquarters moved from New York to San Mateo, California. The firm specializes in conservatively managed mutual funds. It offers products under the Franklin, Templeton, Mutual Series and Fiduciary brand names. Like other large investment companies, the firm offers a wide variety of funds but is traditionally best known for bond funds under the Franklin brand, international funds under the Templeton brand, and value funds under the Mutual Series brand.

Franklin Templeton

American Express Ventures is American Express's strategic investment group. They invest in innovative startups in order to enhance American Express’s core capabilities and accelerate the company’s efforts in consumer commerce and B2B services.

American Express Ventures

TQ Ventures is an early-stage venture firm led by Andrew Marks and Schuster Tanger. We manage over $1 billion in assets and are currently investing from our $500m Fund III. As generalists, we're agnostic to industry vertical and geography; instead, we're business model-driven and prioritize partnering with extraordinary founders building primarily software businesses. We're proud of the reputation we've earned in the founder community, which has come from our approach to partnership and our differentiated networks and support.

TQ Ventures

Kraken Ventures invests in businesses and projects at the nexus of both the fintech and blockchain/crypto revolutions. The company provides a combination of the two by being a completely autonomous fund backed by Kraken's resources and expertise. Kraken Ventures invests in financial infrastructure, Web3, digital economies, consumer crypto protocols, and enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Kraken Ventures

Tactical growth investments in b2b technology.

Verdure Capital Management

Pinwheel

Pinwheel is the market-leading payroll data connectivity platform. Fintechs and financial institutions alike trust Pinwheel to access the data and controls within traditional and non-traditional payroll platforms to update direct deposits, streamline income and employment verification, improve underwriting, power earned wage access, and build innovative new products.  With consumer permissioning, Pinwheel connects to the majority of these providers, covering over 1,400+ platforms and nearly 80% of anyone receiving a paycheck in the US, to enable market-leading fintechs, like Block (formerly Square), to easily access and update the payroll data of more than 100 million US-based employed people. Pinwheel is the only provider that handles both direct deposit switching and the provision of income and employment data to be Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). To learn more, visit www.pinwheelapi.com.

Pinwheel offers an API-based infrastructure platform for financial institutions and FinTechs to access payroll related data to enhance loan underwriting, to offer innovative lending products (such as earned wage access [EWA] and paycheck-linked loans). Pinwheel uses information on employment, income (including hourly clock-ins and salaries), and paystubs to streamline income and employment verification. Pinwheel also lets users update direct deposits through the platform.

Democratizing financial technology with a suite of API-based solutions

FinTech Infrastructure

MANTL Names Pinwheel Preferred Partner for Direct Deposit Switching

Pinwheel offers an API-based infrastructure platform for financial institutions and FinTechs to access payroll related data to enhance loan underwriting, to offer innovative lending products (such as earned wage access [EWA] and paycheck-linked loans). Pinwheel uses information on employment, income (including hourly clock-ins and salaries), and paystubs to streamline income and employment verification. Pinwheel also lets users update direct deposits through the platform. Pinwheel obtains the data through connections with over 1,400 traditional and non-traditional platforms (as of January 2022), which it claims can access around 80% of people receiving paychecks in the US (including gig and creator economy workers). In January 2022, Pinwheel claimed that its platform executes over 4.6 million processes per month and that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) reportedly rose 177x in 2021.Key customers and partnershipsThe company expanded its platform offering by partnering with data aggregation and account connectivity platform <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/37235">MX </a>in September 2021. As of January 2022, Pinwheel’s users included <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/17115">Block </a>(formerly known as Square), Varo, Lendly, and Daylight.Funding and financials Pinwheel <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7859?industryIds=53">raised USD 50 million </a>in Series B funding in January 2022, at a USD 500 million valuation, to invest in expanding its workforce and expanding into new business verticals (such as tax preparation).

Cross River Bank provides a white-label banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform for enterprises, combining banking services, payments, and marketplace lending infrastructure to build fintechs. Its solutions comprise demand deposits, savings accounts, credit and debit cards, and payment clearing services, including automated clearing house (ACH) and real-time payments. The company also provides banking and payment infrastructure for the crypto industry, including risk management services for its crypto clients. Key customers and partnerships As of December 2020, the company had over 400 employees, and had entered into more than 30 partnerships. Moreover, as of March 2021, the platform had been used to support over 375,000 small businesses through the paycheck protection program (PPP).Cross River Bank teamed up with UK-based BaaS provider <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/421515">Railsr </a>in January 2019 to launch a common API for their platforms to be used globally. As of April 2022, Cross River had over 80 clients including lenders such as Affirm, Best Egg, and Upstart, neobanks such as <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/220119">Revolut </a>, and blockchain-based payment processing platform GreenBox. The platform reportedly originated over USD 24 billion in loans per annum, around 10x the value of loans it originated in 2015. Cross River Bank has expanded its operations by acquiring Betterfin, a platform offering lending-as-a-service (LaaS) solutions, in November 2021. Through the acquisition, Cross River Bank leveraged Betterfin’s software to digitize parts of the small-business lending process (such as origination and underwriting).The company partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/1643">American Express </a>(Amex) to enable FinTechs to issue credit cards through Cross River Bank, on the Amex network, while also providing select Amex benefits to the FinTechs.Funding and financials The company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/9458">raised USD 620 million in funding </a>co-led by Eldridge and a16z, at a valuation of over USD 3 billion, to invest in product developments, recruitment, international expansion, and boosting strategic partnerships.

Cross River Bank

Synctera was co-founded in 2020 by Peter Hazlehurst, the former head of Uber Money, who previously led the development of Google Wallet. The company offers an API-based infrastructure platform for community and regional banks to find and partner with FinTechs. This enables FinTechs to leverage the former’s licenses to embed FDIC-insured mobile checking, debit cards, savings accounts, and payment innovations, among other features. The API platform offered to the banks will then be sold to the FinTechs to code on. Although the end customers interact with the FinTechs, they legally belong to the bank.<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8117">Synctera mainly charges the banks </a>based on the interchange fees they earn (half of the interchange fees, as of January 2022) from the services provided. It does not charge them an initial amount to use the platform. Moreover, the platform also embeds fraud-as-a-service and charges FinTechs on a per transaction basis (4 cents per transaction) should they choose to use it. It subsequently shares that revenue 50/50 with the banks.The company launched the “t-minus10” project in January 2022, which offers a live sandbox for FinTechs to build apps, test, and go to market, enhancing their access to banking partners. It subsequently launched a “Smart Charge Card” (APIs to build, launch, and issue charge cards) and “White-label Banking App” (a codebase for developers to build embedded banking products or neobank apps) infrastructure in October 2022.Key customers and partnershipsIn February 2022, Lineage Bank (a community bank in Tennessee) and GoGetr (FinTech aiming to promote health and wealth management) became the first companies to launch a banking solution using the Synctera platform. As of March 2023, the platform was working with around 50 fintechs, of which 14 were live (including Wayapay and Float). Synctera reportedly had over 20 implementations set for launch in the following two months.Synctera announced a new card issuing and management infrastructure offering (Card-as-a-Service), in July 2021, which it developed in partnership with Mastercard and leading card issuing infrastructure disruptor, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/64287">Marqeta</a>.Funding and financialsIn March 2024, Synctera raised USD 18.6 million in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27244">Series A1 extension</a> co-led by Lightspeed and Fin Capital. The company earmarked the funds to support business growth by facilitating more complex use cases across the US and international markets. The company also <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16980?industryIds=53">raised USD 15 million</a> in funding led by NAventures in March 2023, to invest in expanding the platform’s use cases and broadening its geographic footprint beyond the US (including expanding to Canada). Meanwhile, Synctera has also partnered with the National Bank of Canada to enable companies to launch FinTech apps and embedded banking products in Canada.

Synctera

Based in the UK, Weavr, formerly known as Open Payments Cloud, was spun out of payment provider Ixaris in 2019. Weavr offers the infrastructure for enterprises to embed banking services across various industries, including education, fitness, logistics, etc. Weavr’s “Meta” platform combines multiple banking and payments partners in one platform through application programming interfaces (APIs). Using the APIs, enterprises can embed virtual banking services such as card payments, fund transfers, and international banking accounts.Weavr expanded its operations to Singapore in November 2022, as part of its global expansion plans.Key customers and partnershipsAs of July 2021, Weavr’s customers included Finway, Thanks Ben, and MySkillCamp, among others.In October 2019, Weavr partnered with payment service providers Global Processing Services (GPS), Paynetics, and iDenfy to enable developers to create and run sophisticated and streamlined payment experiences for their European customers through Weavr.Funding and financialsWeavr <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8647?industryIds=53">raised USD 40 million </a>in Series A funding in February 2022, led by Tiger Global, less than a year after <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4166">raising GBP 4 million (USD 5.5 million) </a>in seed funding in July. The funds were earmarked for business development and recruitment to support Weavr’s expansion to the US market, while also supporting its continued expansion in the UK and Europe.

Weavr

MX offers an open finance portal, data connectivity application programming interface (API), and MX platform API for banks, credit unions, and other financial service providers. The company’s solutions allow its clients to utilize financial data to reduce fraud, approve loans faster, and improve their customer experiences. In addition to APIs and connections, MX also offers a range of capabilities, including data aggregation, analytics, financial feed insights, wealth and investment services, and verification services. MX looks to enable banks and financial institutions to launch next-generation services and apps that automate and personalize financial experiences. As of January 2021, the company noted that it worked with more than 2,000 banks, credit unions, and FinTech companies, and its platform reached over 200 million end-users. Moreover, it also powered 43 of the top 50 digital banks as of the same period. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8753?industryIds=53">February 2022, MX partnered </a>with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/361160">Rize </a>, to enable users to access Rize’s banking infrastructure to build, launch, and scale financial products through a single API, thereby reducing the development time and cost. In January 2021, MX raised USD 300 million in a Series C funding round led by TPG Capital, at a valuation of USD 1.9 billion. The newly raised funds are to be invested in improving MX’s capabilities, expanding its global presence, and increasing its workforce. In January 2021, MX noted that its headcount tripled over the past two years, reaching 550 staff members. The company appointed Shane Evans as interim chief executive officer (CEO) in January 2022, to prepare the company for an IPO or sale (at a valuation of over USD 5 billion) and oversee its growth.

Bankable is a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) infrastructure provider allowing financial institutions and corporations to utilize its API to integrate banking services. It provides a platform for its enterprise customers to offer modular banking services, including ledger management (process data from multiple banks to support cash management for global corporate affairs), digital banking, payment cards, and e-wallets. The company expanded its platform by <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19662">acquiring Arex Markets </a>in June 2023, to embed working capital solutions (such as flexible invoice financing, corporate credit cards, lodged cars, and revolving credit). The company has a global presence, with operations spanning from the US to the Middle East as of January 2021. Bankable noted that the expansion of its global footprint also helps its European and US FinTech clients expand their operations internationally. Key customers and partnerships In January 2020, the company partnered with the diversified FinTech infrastructure provider <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/85350">Plaid </a>, which enabled Bankable’s customers to use Plaid’s tech to connect to more than 15,000 banks in the US and Europe. Funding and financialsIn April 2019, <a href="https://sp-edge.com/companies/13061">Visa </a>invested an undisclosed sum in Bankable and entered a partnership with the startup. Through the partnership, Visa members obtained access to Bankable’s platform, while Bankable used VisaNet (Visa’s electronic global payments network) to extend its international payment and banking solutions.

Bankable

Platforms that allow FinTechs to integrate banking services such as opening and maintaining accounts, facilitating card payments, etc.


Platforms that enable FinTechs to integrate a range of payment-related services such as one-time payments, subscriptions, and receipt management for domestic and cross-border transactions.


Companies that enable organizations to embed anti-money laundering (AML), identity verification, and know-your-customer (KYC) solutions.


Platforms that allow FinTechs to integrate lending services,  by typically applying AI/ML technology to a spending analysis to analyze creditworthiness.

Companies providing APIs and integrations for FinTechs to access securities markets, facilitate transactions and clearing, and provide insights to help end-users manage their finances.

May specialize in promoting inclusiveness in financial services, primarily in the investment and lending spaces

AI/ML can improve the quality of their offerings, such as using AI/ML to reduce biases

Used for payment completions, accessing banking and transaction data, and providing financial insights, among others

Pinwheel

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