Plaid

Plaid Inc. builds the connective infrastructure that lets consumer and business financial applications read data from, and move money through, a user's existing bank accounts. Founded in San Francisco in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey, the company started with a single developer API that returned clean, categorised transaction data, and has since grown into a network that Plaid says reaches more than 12,000 financial institutions and is used by over 9,000 fintech applications.

The core product, Plaid Link, is the account-connection flow embedded in apps such as Venmo, Robinhood, Chime, SoFi and Affirm. Around that connectivity Plaid has layered a set of higher-margin products: bank-to-bank payments and pay-by-bank, identity verification and anti-fraud, income and asset verification for lending, and alternative credit data for underwriting. In its 2025 shareholder letter the company said these newer products accounted for more than 20% of revenue and were growing at over 90% a year.

Plaid's commercial position rests on permissioned access to consumer bank data, which makes it unusually exposed to open-banking regulation. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Section 1033 rule, finalised in October 2024, would have codified a consumer right to share account data; it has since been enjoined while the Bureau reconsiders it, leaving the legal framework unsettled. In parallel, Plaid has negotiated bilateral commercial terms with large banks — most visibly a renewed data-access agreement with JPMorgan Chase announced in September 2025 that, for the first time, attaches a fee structure to data pulls.

The company's valuation history is unusually volatile for an infrastructure business. Visa agreed to buy Plaid for $5.3 billion in January 2020; the Department of Justice sued to block the deal on antitrust grounds and Visa walked away in January 2021. Plaid then raised a $425 million Series D at $13.4 billion in April 2021, took a down round to $6.1 billion in April 2025, and was marked at $8 billion in a February 2026 employee share sale.

Plaid is still private and has not filed an S-1. Bloomberg reported in July 2026 that the company had held preliminary conversations with banks about a US listing; chief executive Zach Perret has said an IPO is "absolutely on our path for the coming years" without committing to a date,.