Synapse, a San Francisco-based fintech startup, has raised $33 million in a series B round led by a16z, with participation from existing investors Trinity and Core and unnamed individual investors, including 9Yards Capital, reports Henry Vilar of Fintech Futures, Finovate’s sister publication.

This brings the start-up’s total raised to $50 million, following a $17 million series A round in September 2018. Synapse says it has over three million clients using its cloud-based tools, with 10,000 new signups and five million API requests every day.

In total, Synapse says it has facilitated more than $10 billion in transactions to date. The company reports facilitating more than $2 billion as automated clearing house (ACH) and $40 million in payment card transactions for over 100 companies so far this year.

Synapse provides payment, deposit, lending, and investment products as APIs to financial technology companies, which in turn launch consumer-facing financial services.

The fintech plans to build direct processor integrations with both Mastercard and Visa, which it expects will speed up API calls around card issuance and open up features like just-in-time funding and dynamic spending controls.

The company also intends to launch a brokerage account product and to enhance its loan origination and servicing API. This will make it easier for developers to apply for a warehouse line of credit and add automated text and phone loan collection support.

Toward the end of this year, the goal is to launch services in Europe and Canada, starting with payments, deposits, and debit card issuance. Lending and investment products will follow.

The firm plans a chatbot platform to answer customer questions, along with self-servicing tools for developers, a seed investing program. Synapse will also improve its security tools, including its ID verification and video authentication stack, add-ons around duplicate profile detection, and fraud and transaction monitoring.

“After 2019, our goal is to add support for two key markets each year, plus one underserved market, where we will build consumer-facing products until developer ecosystems are built,” said cofounder and CEO, Sankaet Pathak.

As a part of the series B, a16z’s Angela Strange and Michael Hoffmeyer, director at the Crews Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Memphis, have joined Synapse’s board of directors.

Founded in 2015, Synapse demoed its white label loan issuance at FinovateSpring last year. The tool originates and services unsecured consumer and business loans while providing customizable decisioning, automated compliance, smart notifications, and an origination and servicing UI.

 

SynapseFI is making public what insiders have known for months: the Bay Area banking platform provider closed a $17 million Series A late last year. Trinity Ventures and Core Innovation Capital led the round.

In a blog post thanking the customers who “build awesome products on top of us and pay our bills,” company CEO and founder Sankaet Pathak explained both what SynapseFI does and what he called “our super secret plan” to democratize banking.

“Our super secret plan is to build a better operating system for banking that is less expensive to maintain and easy to innovate on top of,” he wrote. “Then to change banking from a lending or transactions business to a SaaS business.” In order to do this, SynapseFI focuses on three areas: back office automation to lower per customer costs, vertical integration of all products and services, and behavioral economic research to help firms build consumer-friendly financial solutions.

“I am beyond excited for what lies ahead,” Pathak wrote. “The capital infusion is not just a testament to the team executing well; it is also a testament to the need for democratized financial access for all people – regardless if they hold ten dollars in their bank account, or ten million.”

Founded in 2015, SynapseFI demonstrated its white label loan issuance solution at FinovateSpring 2018. The solution provides origination and servicing of unsecured consumer and business loans, including customizable decisioning, automated compliance, and smart notifications. With a goal of simplifying banking, SynapseFI provides an intuitively-designed bank with more efficient, automated back office and access to key services for all customers.

SynapseFI began the year with news that it would support interchange processing for debit and credit card transactions. Last month the company announced new custodial accounts for escrow, payment, and crowdfunding applications, as well as a new multi-bank savings account offering that enables per user FDIC coverage of up to $16 million.

In May SynapseFI unveiled its first Crypto Wallet for Bitcoin (recently updated). The company began the year with the launch of its Design Lab, which helps developers improve the UX for their financial solutions.