Plaid
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2013CEO / Founder
Zach PerretEmployees
1001-5000Funding
Series D+ — $734MProducts
0 products listedWebsite
plaid.com/
Profile updated
About Plaid
Plaid is a financial technology infrastructure company founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company operates a data network that sits between consumer-facing financial applications and banks, allowing users to securely link their bank accounts and share financial data with third-party apps.
Plaid's core product is an API suite that enables developers to access bank account data, verify account ownership, confirm balances, and initiate payments. Its network connects to thousands of financial institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe. Notable customers and integrations include Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, and a wide range of personal finance, lending, and investment applications. Plaid also offers products such as Identity Verification, Income verification, and Signal, a tool for assessing ACH return risk.
Plaid raised a $425 million Series D round in 2021 at a $13.4 billion valuation, following a terminated $5.3 billion acquisition by Visa that was abandoned in January 2021 after the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit. Prior funding rounds include a $250 million Series C in 2019. The company employs roughly 1,000 to 1,500 people and has expanded its product footprint beyond data connectivity into payment initiation and identity verification services.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
No products listed yet for this company.
Competitive Landscape
Who Plaid competes with, and how they differ.
MX sells its bank-data platform directly to banks and credit unions for white-labeled personal-finance and data-enrichment tools, while Plaid sells developer-first APIs to fintech apps connecting to end users' accounts.
Yodlee, owned by Envestnet since 2015, is the oldest bank-data aggregator (two decades in market) leaning more on enterprise wealth-management and PFM vendor clients than Plaid's developer self-serve model.
Finicity, acquired by Mastercard in 2020, uses its card-network parent to negotiate direct API agreements with major US banks (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo), reducing reliance on credential scraping for lending and mortgage-verification use cases where it competes hardest with Plaid.
Stripe's Financial Connections feature lets merchants link customer bank accounts natively inside Stripe's payment stack for ACH debits and verification, competing with Plaid for a slice of bank-linking use cases even though Stripe's core business is payment processing, not standalone data connectivity.
TrueLayer leads in European open banking, offering GDPR-compliant account data plus payment initiation across the UK and EU, a region where Plaid's coverage is comparatively thin.
Akoya, spun off from Fidelity in 2020 and jointly owned with The Clearing House and 11 major US banks, connects via bank-sanctioned direct APIs rather than credential aggregation, covering fewer institutions than Plaid but with data access banks explicitly endorse.
Company Timeline
Key milestones in Plaid's history, with sources.
- Milestone
Plaid holds preliminary IPO talks with banks
Bloomberg reported Plaid engaged in preliminary discussions with banks about a potential US listing, with no final decision made and analysts estimating an $8.5B-$10B IPO valuation.
pymnts.com - Funding
Employee-liquidity tender round values Plaid at $8B
Plaid secured an $8 billion valuation in a new funding round designed to give employees liquidity for their shares, up from the $6.1B valuation set in April 2025 but still below its 2021 peak.
pymnts.com - Funding
$575M common-stock sale (not a Series E) led by Franklin Templeton at $6.1B valuation
Plaid sold about $575 million of common stock at a $6.1 billion post-money valuation, led by Franklin Templeton with participation from Fidelity, BlackRock, NEA and Ribbit Capital. Plaid explicitly said this was not a Series E round, and CEO Zach Perret called it the last private fundraise before an eventual IPO.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series D — $425M led by Altimeter Capital at $13.4B valuation
Plaid raised a $425 million Series D led by Altimeter Capital, with new investors Silver Lake and Ribbit Capital and returning backers a16z, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and NEA, valuing the company at $13.4 billion — its first raise after the scrapped Visa acquisition.
techstartups.com - Milestone
Visa and Plaid terminate $5.3B merger agreement after DOJ antitrust suit
Visa and Plaid mutually terminated their proposed $5.3 billion merger agreement, and the Department of Justice dismissed its antitrust litigation, roughly a year after the deal was first announced.
techcrunch.com - Milestone
Visa agrees to acquire Plaid for $5.3B
Visa signed a definitive agreement to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion (about $4.9B cash plus $0.4B in retention/deferred equity) — roughly double Plaid's prior $2.65B private valuation. The deal was later abandoned in January 2021.
pymnts.com - Funding
Series C — $250M led by Kleiner Perkins growth fund (Mary Meeker) at $2.65B valuation
Plaid raised a $250 million Series C at a $2.65 billion valuation, led by Mary Meeker via Kleiner Perkins' growth fund, who joined the board; Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest and Coatue also participated alongside existing backers Goldman Sachs, NEA and Spark Capital.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series B — $44M led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners
Plaid raised a $44 million Series B led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, with Series A investor NEA also participating, to grow the team and expand integrations with financial institutions internationally.
prnewswire.com - Funding
Seed round — $2.8M led by Spark Capital
Plaid raised a $2.8 million seed round led by Spark Capital, with Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Felicis Ventures and Homebrew Capital participating, shortly after founders Zach Perret and William Hockey built the Plaid prototype at a 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon.
techcrunch.com
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