Synapse Raises $33 Million for Scaling Operations and Expansion

Synapse, a financial technology company that operates a platform that allows banks and other fintech companies to efficiently develop financial services has concluded a $33 million Series B funding. The purpose of capital raising is to create new products and launch an international expansion.

The investment in the San Francisco-based startup was led by Andereessen Horowitz, along with venture capital firms Trinity Ventures and Core Innovation Capital.

Bryan Keltner and India-born CEO Sankaet Pathak founded in 2014. Pathak came to the U.S. to study but eventually got frustrated at the difficulty of opening a bank account without U.S. social security records. Pathak’s struggles turned on to become the inspiration behind Synapse, whose operation is under the radar before acquiring a $17 million Series A funding round on September 2018. Since its inception, the company focused on democratizing financial services.

Synapse, which recently gets a slight rebranding from its original name SynapseFi, has an innovative approach in facilitating operations of making banks and other financial providers to work with developers. The startup does this through a platform.

The current system used by technological development companies is complicated. It involves various standards, code bases, interfaces, and other issues in compatibility that leads to confusion and waste of time.

Synapse’s unique developer- and bank-facing APIs method aims to makes the process simple for companies to communicate and connect with banks. In turn, banks can easily communicate with their process automation and extension of its back-end operations.

Pathak said Synapse wants to make the system easy for developers to create and scale financial products. He added that the company intends to carry out the development across a range of financial products.

The company’s product development philosophy is a “Lego brick” approach. Its modules and services include payment, lending, deposit, ID verification/KYC, investment services, and card issuance.

Through a deal with a16z, a venture company, Angela Strange — a16z’s fintech and general partner — would join the startup’s board. Strange described the startup as the AWS of banking for its potential to let anyone build a fintech company, just like the way Amazon’s cloud services allows anyone to develop and deploy a web service anywhere.