As I noted a few weeks ago, 2023 was a year of “building for impact”. In short, we went live in Canada in under 9 months and we’ve now scaled our ARR 4.5x thanks to some new exciting big customers.

If you remember the graphic we used in that post, it had a dial that was pointing between impact and scale. Basically, it’s time to turn everything up to 11…

And we’re more than ready for it. I’m super proud of our team and our progress to date.

Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve extended our Series A round to give us further ability to deliver on our goals.

Additionally, I’m delighted to share that we’ve appointed Leigh Gross as our Chief Revenue Officer. Leigh is a dynamic and experienced sales and go to market leader. He’s been working in FinTech for over 10 years with companies like Array, Summer, CommonBond, and CAN Capital, in addition to prior experience as a commercial attorney and in media…we are thrilled to have him on the team to help us take our go to market to the next level.

A huge thank you to all those that participated in this round and who share our vision for embedded banking’s future. This $18.6M Series A extension was co-led by two of those investors who led our Seed (Lightspeed) and our A (Fin Capital). Joining them are other existing investors NAVentures, the venture arm of our partner bank National Bank of Canada, and Diagram (our earliest pre-seed investor). We’re also grateful for several new investors that have joined in this round, including Banco Popular, and Mana Ventures.

Building a new platform for embedded finance and banking takes a lot of resources, time and talent, so we’re honored to work with them and are appreciative that they get that we’re doing things the right way. 

The first question everyone has when you’re fortunate enough to raise money from outside investors is “What do you plan on doing with it?” The answer is… a whole lot of things, but it’s mostly about supporting our customer growth and launching many great new clients and helping them scale.

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Speaking of scale…

At Money 2020 in October of 2022, I received a text from my good friend Terry Angelos who was CEO of DriveWealth at the time. He invited me to his booth on the exhibitor floor to meet with a potential client that wanted to launch a new banking service in the US for their Brazilian customers. That client was BTG Pactual, the largest investment bank in Latin America.

We met with the team and it was clear that we were aligned on building great technology and valuable solutions that in partnership would yield a really unique customer experience for their Wealth Management team.

We have been building up a skill set for managing the complexities of international banking and BTG was a perfect match. We quickly iterated on the design and spent almost six months preparing for launch in Q3 of 2023. Launching BTG was a big, complex project that spanned geographies and platforms, but collectively we pulled it off and the product is scaling amazingly well.

We have a number of similar customers to BTG in the works that we will be announcing in the next couple of quarters, and this funding will help us scale up our tech and people and processes to manage ever larger and more complex programs.

One of the things we’ve heard from our bigger clients and prospects is that they were considering building an embedded banking experience from scratch on their own. I did that at Uber, for Uber Money, but we had a really big team that we could divert to the program. That experience led to the founding of Synctera, because If I had the chance to do it again, I would’ve partnered with a company like ours instead. To help folks understand the true costs and effort, we decided to write a painstakingly comprehensive guide to help you navigate the Build vs. Buy decision making process. Be sure to keep an eye out for it ;)

The progress with our US-based customers is going gangbusters, too. We appreciate the trust and unique use cases and challenges that come with them from companies like EXO Freight, Sawa Credit, Reset, Waltz, Flutterwave and Firstcard. There are many more, and their creativity, diversity and scale are fun to be a part of.

Our platform wouldn’t be as strong without great partner banks in our ecosystem. Hard to do embedded finance and banking without a bank! We’re very lucky to work with some amazing banks, with Stearns joining us most recently. They’ve already been working in BaaS, so it’s exciting to be able to add our technology stack to their banking experience with enhanced compliance and regulatory oversight. 

On that note, I can assure you that we’ll continue to push the envelope this year and beyond…safely and steadily, of course. We’re in a highly regulated industry, and for good reason. If you have a business that touches someone else’s money, you shouldn’t go to bed at night unless you’re 100% sure that you’re doing right by them. That’s the challenge that’s ahead of us, our customers, and our partners. But of course, the bigger the challenge, the more impact we can make.

Game on.

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Tx

p