Solid banks $63M for easier deployment of embedded fintech products
Solid, which rebranded from Wise in 2021, raised a $63 million Series B round of funding to continue providing its fintech-as-a-service offering for companies wanting to launch and scale their own fintech products.
The San Mateo-based company works with fintech and vertical SaaS companies and offers banking, payments, cards and cryptocurrency products via easy-to-integrate APIs.
We last profiled the company in 2020, before its name change, and after it had picked up both a $5.7 million seed and a $12 million Series A.
Arjun Thyagarajan, co-founder and CEO at Solid, told TechCrunch that the company spent the last 18 months working with early customers on product-market fit.
Traditional fintech infrastructure was not built for the modern company, he explained, and that results in companies needing dozens of point solutions and often spending millions in upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, all before launching an actual product.
Instead, by utilizing APIs and a few lines of code, customers can embed fintech products and get them up-and-running quickly.
“Customers aren’t looking for UI/UX, but really for DI/DX, that developer interface with a powerful dashboard that is self-service,” he said. “We understood what they were looking for — that demand for modern infrastructure. They work with banks, but those often don’t have tools for launching the fintech experience or the building blocks to make it easy to put together.”
It was also during that time that they decided to rebrand as they solidified their business-to-business focus. The new Solid name also resonated more with customers, Thyagarajan added.
Over the past year, Solid grew 10x in revenue, doubled its customers to 100 and became profitable. Year to date, the company processed $2 billion in transactions.
After being in sort of a stealth mode during the past 18 months, Thyagarajan said the company was now on a journey to get to 100 customers. To do that, he and co-founder Raghav Lal thought it was time to go after new funding. They started the process in May and closed the Series B at the end of July.
“We saw early signs of product market fit, so our thought process was to do the Series B when we were ready for hypergrowth, and now we have cash in the bank,” Thyagarajan said. “We are going after the mid-market, so we had to go back and fine-tune our product as we figured out what businesses need. The key was to build our technology from the ground up to own the complete experience so we could give customers what they want.”
FTV Capital led the new investment and was joined by existing investor Headline. To date, Solid has raised $80.7 million. Thyagarajan didn’t disclose a specific valuation with the new round, but did reveal it was 5x over Solid’s Series A valuation.
The capital infusion will help accelerate Solid’s entrance into some new verticals like travel, logistics, construction, healthcare, education and the gig economy. The company is looking at where money is moving and identified 40 to 50 different verticals where there is an impedance in how money moves, but they want to benefit their customers.
The company is also focusing on mid-market and larger companies, which is another reason why Thyagarajan said the investment was important.
“We are talking to Fortune 1000 companies and they feel more comfortable working with companies with a strong balance sheet,” he added. “A lot of work has been under the radar, so we are getting the brand out and showcasing we are the ‘AWS of fintech,’ a one-stop shop. Our goal is to be alongside them as a partner, not just a vendor.”
