Plaid

Zach Perret recalled that development began in 2012 with a personal-finance and product-recommendation app. Difficulties connecting financial data led the team toward developer infrastructure, offering unified interfaces for account information, payments and identity data.⁠[1]

Plaid’s corporate profile dates its founding to 2013, names Zach Perret and William Hockey as co-founders, and identifies San Francisco as its headquarters.⁠[2]

Plaid publicly launched its product, giving financial-app developers access to its financial-data platform.⁠[1]

Plaid announced a $44 million Series B led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, with participation from existing investors.⁠[1]

Plaid announced a $250 million Series C to expand its team, operations and products. Mary Meeker joined its board in connection with the financing.⁠[3]

Plaid announced its acquisition of investment and brokerage-data aggregator Quovo, extending its checking and savings connectivity into investment assets. Quovo’s customers included Betterment, Wealthfront, SoFi and Vanguard.⁠[4]

Visa and Plaid announced a $5.3 billion acquisition agreement. On November 5, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit alleging that the deal would eliminate Plaid as a potential competitor to Visa’s online debit business.⁠[5][6]

Visa and Plaid agreed to terminate the acquisition. In their joint statement, Visa disputed the Justice Department’s assessment of the companies’ competitive relationship and cited lengthy litigation as an obstacle. The acquisition was never completed.⁠[5]

Plaid announced a $425 million Series D. New investors included Altimeter Capital, Silver Lake and Ribbit CapitalRibbit CapitalRibbit Capital is a venture-capital firm founded in 2012 by Meyer “Micky” Malka and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It began with financial-technology investing and has expanded into AI, commerce and related infrastructure. Its investments include Coinbase, Robinhood and Nubank.Open the full entry; existing investors included Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and Spark CapitalSpark CapitalSpark Capital is a U.S. venture capital firm founded in Boston in 2005, with offices in San Francisco, New York and Boston. Its early-stage and growth funds back technology businesses across fintech, enterprise software, AI and consumer products. Investments have included Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus, Plaid and Anthropic.Open the full entry. The company planned to expand platform capacity, international operations and its product range.⁠[7]

Plaid announced its acquisition of identity-verification and compliance platform Cognito, adding identity verification, know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering screening tools alongside its existing account-connection and funding services.⁠[8]

A federal court in the Northern District of California approved the Cottle v. Plaid settlement, creating a $58 million fund. Plaintiffs alleged unauthorized financial-data collection and misleading interfaces; Plaid denied liability. Approval resolved the settlement without a judicial finding of liability.⁠[9]

The settlement also included deleting unnecessary data, limiting collection, improving account-linking and privacy disclosures, and providing tools to manage connections and delete data.⁠[9]

Plaid announced approximately $575 million in financing led by Franklin Templeton, with Fidelity and existing investors including NEA and Ribbit Capital participating. Proceeds were designated for employee tax withholding as expiring restricted stock units converted into shares, and to provide some liquidity to current employees.⁠[10]

Chief technology officer Will Robinson said Plaid had built its first transaction foundation model for finance, trained on de-identified network data to recognize merchants, payment context and transaction attributes and support the development of its financial-intelligence products.⁠[11]

Plaid confirmed to Crunchbase News that it had completed financing to provide employee liquidity at an $8 billion valuation, up from $6.1 billion in April 2025 but below its $13.4 billion peak in 2021.⁠[12]

This Week in Fintech founder Nik Milanović announced Plaid’s acquisition of the media and community business, saying it would operate as an independent subsidiary with editorial independence. Stablecon and The Fintech Fund were outside the arrangement and would remain independent.⁠[13]

Plaid said its sequential foundation model was running in LendScore Arc, Signal and Cash Advance Index, supporting credit risk, ACH return risk and cash-advance analysis. It also provided reason codes traceable to transaction records and said customers did not need to change existing integrations.⁠[14]

Plaid provides data infrastructure connecting financial accounts and applications, with products extending into payments, lending and fraud prevention. The company says its network covers more than 12,000 financial institutions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe, serving clients including Venmo, SoFi and major banks.⁠[15]

Users connect a financial institution through Plaid and choose information to share with an application. Plaid Portal provides controls to view connections, manage permissions and disconnect accounts. Plaid describes itself as a financial technology provider that does not hold users’ money or open bank accounts.⁠[16]

Auth retrieves details such as account and routing numbers through an API to help customers verify accounts and set up bank payments. In the United States, its account verification can work with different ACH payment processors.⁠[17]

Plaid: Official website: https://plaid.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

X: https://x.com/plaid (opens in a new window); YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: https://www.youtube.com/@PlaidInc (opens in a new window); LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/company/plaid-/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18][19][20]