Synapse, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to become the 'AWS of banking', has raised $33 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreesson Horowitz fund a16z.
Synapse's goal is to give startups and other companies the ability to launch a full suite of compliant banking products across payment, deposit, lending and investments, via a raft of plug-and-play APIs.
Synapse’s founder, Sankaet Pathak says the firm's mission is to reduce barriers to entry for developers to build and scale financial products.
"The idea being, if we can make it easier for everyone to build and scale financial products, more developers will build them, more use cases will be serviced, so more people will have access to best-in-class financial products," he says. "And we want to do this not just in the US, but across the planet."
Synapse now has close to three million end users, with 10K new user signups and five million API requests each day. The company has processed over $2 billion in ACH and $40 million in card transactions so far this year.
Andreessen Horowitz partner Angela Strange says she first came across Synapse in talks with startups who had used the firm's products to ease their entry into the financial services space.
"Synapse’s goal is to enable companies to launch best in class financial products, or as I like to call them, 'the AWS of banking," she says. "Synapse’s clients have launched consumer banking services, business banking services, new cards for different uses and many other financial products that might have taken months or more, or might not have made it to market otherwise. If it was (almost) as easy to launch a fintech company as it is today to launch a website, what might we see happen to innovation overall in the financial services industry?"