Business is booming for many of the startups serving Wall Street’s big banks and financial institutions nationwide, which raked in capital with most asset classes posting strong returns in 2023.
Nine businesses are on this year’s Fintech 50 list in our “Wall Street and Enterprise” category, including longtime regulars Addepar and Trumid and four fraud prevention startups, one of them new to the list this year. Addepar, which helps 1,000 institutions monitor and rebalance their clients’ portfolios across various asset classes, now has data for $5 trillion in assets on its platform, and bond trading firm Trumid is seeing record-high transaction volumes.
With more cash at stake than ever, banks and other fintechs are doubling down on keeping scammers away from the spoils and keeping up with advances in artificial intelligence. Alloy, Persona and SentiLink are making repeat appearances on the list, each multiplying their customer count by at least 50% in 2023. SentiLink uses AI-powered technology to give customers registering accounts a score assessing how likely they are to be a synthetic fraudster, and Persona just partnered with facial recognition firm Paravision to keep underage users off sites that are off limits to children. Newcomer Middesk is a leader in bringing fraud prevention to verification of businesses rather than individuals and helped its 600 customers run 2.5 million checks last year to ensure corporations are legitimate.
AI is also helping to transform work for America’s largest auditing firms thanks to another first-timer on the list: a Netherlands-based startup called DataSnipper. The company’s technology snips data on receipts or bank statements to match them with records of expenses, saving auditors long nights of manual labor. The “Big Four”–accounting giants Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC–are all among 1,400 customers on board, and DataSnipper raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation in January to fund global expansion. Another newcomer, Merge, helps its 300 customers integrate cloud-based accounting and budgeting systems to help their back-end operations run more seamlessly.
One longtime Fintech 50 selection that is dropping off this year’s list is Carta. The largest company providing cap table management for other startups, Carta shut down its secondary trading market in January after facing public criticism from customers for sharing confidential data with prospective investors without permission. Instead, Pulley is a new challenger gaining market share and making its first appearance on the list.
Here are more details on how each of these nine companies are helping financial institutions work more efficiently and effectively.
Addepar
Manages a cloud-based platform that helps private banks, RIAs and family offices track their clients’ portfolios across different currencies and asset classes, from stocks and bonds to venture capital investments and collectibles. Customers monitor $5 trillion in assets through the platform (up from $4 trillion a year ago) and can use it to model asset allocations and rebalance portfolios. Addepar is now investing more than $100 million in research and development annually.
Headquarters: Mountain View, California.
Funding: $500 million from 8VC, D1 Capital Partners, WestCap Group and others.
Latest valuation: $2.17 billion.
Date of last valuation: June 2021.
Bona fides: Grew its customer base, which includes UBS, Stifel and HSBC, from 850 to 1,000 in 2023.
Cofounders: Board chairman Joe Lonsdale, 41, now the managing partner at venture firm 8VC; Jason Mirra, 34, former CTO.
CEO: Eric Poirier, 41, formerly at Palantir and Lehman Brothers.
Alloy
Connects banks and fintechs to fraud prevention tools from 200 data sources that verify customers’ identities during onboarding, monitor transactions to flag suspicious activity and make credit and compliance decisions. Its 500-plus customers include M&T Bank, Stash and numerous regional banks and credit unions.
Headquarters: New York, New York.
Funding: $210 million from Canapi Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and others.
Latest valuation: $1.55 billion.
Date of last valuation: September 2022.
Bona fides: Grew its customer base from 357 to 537 in 2023.
Cofounders: CEO Tommy Nicholas, 35; President Laura Spiekerman, 37; CTO Charles Hearn, 32. The trio worked together at Virginia-based mobile payment processing startup Knox Payments before starting Alloy in 2015.
DataSnipper
Its AI-powered technology makes auditing and accounting more efficient, “snipping” numbers from loose reams of receipts, bank statements or handwritten notes and matching them with records of expenses while ensuring numbers add up. Accounting firms pay a subscription fee per user for the service, with 500,000 auditors in 125 countries signed on. Revenue grew 150% in 2023 to finish at a run rate of more than $45 million. DataSnipper opened its first U.S. office in New York in 2023 to better serve customers—40% of its revenue comes from the U.S.—and raised $100 million in January to fund further expansion.
Headquarters: Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Funding: $200 million from Insight Partners and Index Ventures.
Latest valuation: $1 billion.
Date of last valuation: January 2024.
Bona fides: Doubled customer count in 2023 to 1,400 businesses, including all of the “Big Four” firms.
Cofounders: Jonas Ruyter, 32, Maarten Alblas, 32, and Kai Bakker, 31, bootstrapped the business for its first five years after founding it in 2017.
CEO: Vidya Peters, 43, former Marqeta chief operating officer and marketing veteran for Intuit’s QuickBooks who was recruited to take over in 2023.
Merge
Merge sells a platform that helps companies integrate their cloud-based accounting, payroll, budget, tax, and human resources systems. The company offers hundreds of integrations. CEO Shensi Ding likens the concept to a one-stop-shop for takeout that allows you to order Chinese, Indian or Italian without having to deal with each restaurant’s quirky site.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Funding: $75 million from Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Addition and others.
Latest valuation: $325 million.
Date of last valuation: October 2022.
Bona fides: Merge’s 300 customers include ByteDance, Korn Ferry and Ramp; also reached $14 million in revenue in 2023, up from $8 million in 2022.
Cofounders: CEO Shensi Ding, 31, and Gil Feig, 30, the duo are best friends from Columbia University, where both studied computer science.
Middesk
Using data from primary sources, including the Secretary of State offices in all 50 states, Middesk helps its customers verify businesses trying to open deposit accounts, take out loans or get onboarded to payments rails while keeping fraudulent companies out. Despite competing with legacy databases such as Dun & Bradstreet and Lexis-Nexis, this startup already has 600 customers, including national and regional banks and business banking fintechs such as Mercury and Bluevine.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Funding: $80 million from Insight Partners Canapi Ventures, Sequoia Capital and others.
Latest valuation: $760 million.
Date of last valuation: July 2022.
Bona fides: Customers ran 2.5 million checks on businesses last year, up from 1 million in 2022, with Middesk receiving a small fee for each one.
Cofounders: CEO Kyle Mack, 33, and CTO Kurt Ruppel, 38, previously worked together at Checkr, which runs background checks on job candidates.
Persona
Helps enterprise customers, including Robinhood, Brex and Square, verify their users’ identities and comply with regulatory requirements. Its products can verify IDs in more than 200 countries, assess risk and analyze connections between flagged accounts to block fraud. In October 2023 it launched a “Reusable Personas” feature enabling individual users to securely store and reuse personal data on different devices, and to control that data, sharing it with the companies they choose. In November it partnered with AI firm Paravision to enhance its age estimation and verification capabilities for sites that are off limits to children or restricted by age.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Funding: $218 million from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Coatue Management and others.
Latest valuation: $1.5 billion.
Date of last valuation: September 2021.
Bona fides: Number of customers grew 80% to 1,800 in 2023, with additions including Paxos and Solana.
Cofounders: CEO Rick Song, 33, and CTO Charles Yeh, 31; Song is a former engineer at Square, while Yeh was technical lead at Dropbox.
Pulley
Cap table management firm competing with larger peer Carta, which faced customer blowback in January for sharing sensitive information about startups with secondary market investors. Pulley promised to cover the remaining cost of defectors’ contracts if they switched by the end of the month and added hundreds of customers in January. Its robust fundraising model tells founders exactly how much their stakes will be diluted in complex early-stage rounds, and an offer letter tool automatically updates the cap table when a new employee accepts. Last year, Pulley began tracking token distributions for Web3 and blockchain firms. Plans start at $1,200 per year for startups with up to 25 stakeholders.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Funding: $50 million from Founders Fund, Stripe, YCombinator and others.
Latest valuation: $250 million.
Date of last valuation: October 2022.
Bona fides: Has 4,600 customers, up 109% since the beginning of 2023.
Cofounders: CEO Yin Wu, 35, serial entrepreneur who sold a previous company to Microsoft; Mark Erdmann, 40, expert software engineer.
SentiLink
SentiLink uses AI-powered machine learning and a team of manual reviewers to prevent fraud for 300 clients including 10 of America’s 15 largest banks and dozens of fintech unicorns. It provides a synthetic fraud score and identity theft score assessing risk on a scale of zero to 1,000 when somebody opens an account or applies for a loan, predicting how likely it is that the user is a fraudster. Synthetic identity theft, when somebody combines a fake name with a real stolen Social Security number, is hard for traditional systems to detect and becoming more common.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California.
Funding: $85 million from Craft Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and others.
Latest valuation: $430 million, according to PitchBook.
Date of last valuation: July 2021.
Bona fides: SentiLink processed 359 million identity checks in 2023, 11% more than the previous year.
Cofounders: CEO Naftali Harris, 31, and COO Maxwell Blumenfeld, 32, met at the University of Chicago and worked together fighting fraud at lending fintech Affirm.
Trumid
Corporate debt trading platform that executes large trades of investment-grade, high-yield, distressed and emerging market bonds for users at 815 financial institutions. More than 1,000 users trade on the platform every month, with total volume for 2023 of nearly $1 trillion. In 2023, it added features for list-based trading, allowing users to buy portfolios in addition to single securities, and a “request for quote” protocol that makes it easier for clients to view and respond to listings.
Headquarters: New York, New York.
Funding: $650 million from Point Break, Motive, Dragoneer and others.
Latest valuation: $2.4 billion.
Date of last valuation: October 2021.
Bona fides: Average daily trading volume in November 2023 was up 74% year-over-year to $4.6 billion.
Founder: Co-CEO Ronnie Mateo, 50, a former bond trader at Trinity Brokers; Lehman Brothers and Barclays vet Mike Sobel, 44, joined Trumid as president and was named co-CEO in 2021.