Synapse, a banking API developer, has closed its Series B on $33m to support its growth strategy for 2019 which includes the launch of brokerage accounts.
US-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz tapped its a16z fund to lead the Series B. Participation also came from previous backers of Synapse, including Trinity and Core and 9Yards Capital.
The startup’s goal is to low entry levels for developers to build and scale financial products. It’s belief is that if everyone can build and scale financial products, more developers will create them and the market will have a greater number of financial products to choose from, the company said.
While the company is currently used in the US market, it plans to offer its services around the world. The company’s services have around three million end-users, with 10,000 new user signups and five million API requests a day. Additionally, Synapse has processes more than $2bn in ACH and $40m in card transactions in 2019 alone.
The startup builds a host of API services to help companies and banks build and launch financial products. Its tools can help companies build card processing services, money transfer tools, deposit and saving accounts, clearing accounts, crypto wallets, one-time loans, revolving loans, and authentication capabilities.
By leveraging Synapse, a company can build and integrate a tool to instantly authenticate the identity of users via bank account aggregation. By accessing a user’s bank account, the system can validate whether they own the account, instantly attain an account and routing number for ACH transfers.
According to Synapse’s roadmap for 2019, it is planning to launch card issuance services later in the quarter. Supporting card issuance will be ATM withdrawals at Allpoint terminals, and cash deposits for debit cards. Synapse also hopes to release a new brokerage account product during the quarter.
Other plans scheduled for later in 2019 include the improvement of its loan origination and servicing tools to automate collections, expansion into Europe and Canada, enhancement of its KYC, risk and ID verification tools, and the release of a chatbot service.
The ID verification and video authentication improvements will include new capabilities, such as duplicate account detection, fraud and transaction monitoring, and improvements to SSN, phone number, email and IP data gathering.
