By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 23rd, 2024
The latest Series C funding round worth $250 million was led by popular venture capitalist Mary Meeker through her Kleiner Perkins’ growth fund.
While most of the crypto companies and FinTech firms are ailing in this time of crypto-market turmoil, startup Plaid has a different story to tell! The FinTech startup Plaid recently hit a whopping $2.65 billion valuation after its Series C funding round. The funding round of $250 million was led by popular venture capitalist Mary Meeker. Leading this fresh investment, Meeker will also be joining Plaid’s board of directors.
Meeker’s capital infusion in this latest funding came from Kleiner Perkins’ growth fund, where she’s been working as a partner since 2010. There are some of the big giants from the venture capital industry participating in this funding round. The big names include Norwest Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Venture, and Coatue Management. Some of the already existing investors include NEA, Goldman Sachs, and Spark Capital.
Future Expansion Plans
The latest fundraising with Series C round pushes Plaid to expand its business operations. Plaid is also looking to hire new staff in its offices in New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. Across all of its offices, Plaid currently employees a staff of 175 people. While speaking to Forbes, Plaid co-founder and CEO Zach Perret said that this funding comes as a much-needed buffer as markets become more difficult.
“We think on a decade-long time horizon, so it’s great to find investors who think similarly,” Perret says. “We want to reinvest in scale. And we want to be cognizant that there might be changes in the future.”
Plaid develops the infrastructure and builds developer tools powering a range of financial services and apps. This includes names like Venmo, Coinbase, Robinhood, LendingClub, and Acorns. The Plaid infrastructure acts as a secured layer to allow these services to quickly interact with the customers’ bank accounts. Plaid has integrated with 10,000 banks across the U.S. and Canada, with nearly a quarter of people using its services at least once.
Thus Plaid acts as an intermediate between the banks and providers of FinTech services. While speaking to TechCrunch, Plaid cofounder William Hockey said:
“We were always really infatuated with the concept of financial services. We thought it had so much power to impact and improve people’s lives but at the time it really wasn’t … Thus, we quickly realized building financial services was almost impossible to do because there wasn’t the tooling or the infrastructure, so we turned around and started building that infrastructure.”
While speaking on the company’s long-term goals, Perret told TechCrunch:
“When we think about our long-term goals, we want to make money easier for everyone. We want everyone to lives these simple, straightforward digitally enabled financial lives and for us, that means supporting these tech innovators in the space and these large incumbents. We want to be able to help them create great consumer financial experiences so consumers can live simpler financial lives.”