Visa tried to buy us for $5.3 billion. The DOJ blocked it. At the time it felt like a disaster. Then we raised at $13.4 billion. Sometimes the government does you a favor.
Every time you connect your bank to Venmo, or Robinhood, or Coinbase — that's us. Plaid is the pipe between your bank and every fintech app you use. You use us every day and don't know it.
William and I started by building a budgeting app. It was bad. But the bank connection layer we built for it was really good. So we killed the app and sold the plumbing. Best pivot decision we ever made.
Banks didn't want to work with us at first. We were screen-scraping their data. They hated it. Then they realized their customers wanted fintech apps, and fintech apps needed Plaid. Now they work with us willingly.
We connect to 12,000 financial institutions. Twelve thousand. Every bank, credit union, and brokerage in America, basically. That connectivity took eight years to build. It's the moat.
Open banking is inevitable. Consumers own their data. Banks hold it hostage. We're the locksmith. Every country is moving in this direction — the US is just slower than Europe. As usual.