Solid banks $63M for easier distribution of embedded fintech products – TechCrunch
Solid, which rebranded from Wise in 2021, raised a $63 million funding round to continue offering its fintech-as-a-service offering to companies looking to launch and scale their own fintech products.
The San Mateo-based company works with fintech and vertical SaaS companies, offering banking, payment, card and cryptocurrency products via easy-to-integrate APIs.
We last profiled the company in 2020, before it changed its name and after it had raised both a $5.7 million seed and a $12 million Series A.
Arjun Thyagarajan, co-founder and CEO of 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, resulting in companies needing dozens of point solutions and often spending millions in upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, all before launching an actual product.
Instead, using APIs and a few lines of code, customers can embed fintech products and get them up and running quickly.
“Customers are not looking for UI/UX, but really for DI/DX, that developer interface with a powerful dashboard that’s self-service,” he said. “We understood what they were looking for – the demand for modern infrastructure. They work with banks, but they often don’t have the tools to launch 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 strengthened their business-to-business focus. The new Solid name also resonated more with customers, Thyagarajan added.
During the last year, Solid grew 10 times in turnover, doubled its customers to 100 and became profitable. So far this year, the company has processed $2 billion in transactions.
After being in a sort of stealth mode for the past 18 months, Thyagarajan said the company was now on a journey to reach 100 customers. To do that, he and co-founder Raghav Lal thought it was time to go for new funding. They started the process in May and finished Series B at the end of July.
“We saw early signs of product-market fit, so our thought process was to do Series B when we were ready for hyper-growth, and now we have cash in the bank,” Thyagarajan said. “We’re 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 building 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 did not disclose a specific valuation with the new round, but revealed it was 5x above Solid’s Series A value.
The capital injection will help accelerate Solid’s entry into some new verticals such as travel, logistics, construction, healthcare, education and the gig economy. The company looks at where the money is moving and identified 40 to 50 different verticals where there is an impedance in how money is moving, but they want to benefit customers.
The company also focuses on mid-sized and larger companies, which is another reason why Thyagarajan said the investment was important.
“We talk 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’re getting the brand out there and showing that we’re the ‘AWS of fintech,’ a one-stop shop. Our goal is to be with them as a partner, not just a supplier.”
