Meld, a fintech startup that provides a single integration layer for managing multiple fintech services, has moved out of stealth on the back of an $8 million seed round that closed in Q2 last year.
Founded by Pankaj Bengani, Square's former head of platform and partnerships, Meld is buiilding a 'fintech-stack-as-a-service', integrating third party products into a single API and extensible platform.
"In recent years, we’ve witnessed an explosion in fintech services,"" explains Bengani. "The explosion has resulted in chaos for developers who need to manage numerous integrations to support their product and growth ambitions. The following scenario to building a fintech stack might sound familiar: developers start building their product embedding third party integrations to support their use case. As the business scales, it requires more solutions — quickly resulting in a fragmented multi-layered 'stack' of fintech services. This chaos will only grow, as fragmentation of services in the fintech stack increases."
Under the model, Meld’s customers bring their own third-party service providers onto the platform, and Meld is responsible for integrating each service provider into a single dashboard, freeing developers to concentrate on their own products rather than struggling to keep on top of the fintech service stack.
Bengani says the firm is currently working with Web3 platforms to connect into multiple crypto on-ramps, building access to multiple account aggregators from its Bank Linking Stack, and onboarding software companies to its Payments Stack to add and manage payment providers as they expand their business.
"We’re fortunate to have built Meld with a team that combines experiences at Square, Paypal, Amazon, Wish, Flexport, and Brex," says Bengani. "This team understands what we are solving for and share our vision of providing a fintech stack across key experiences to help save developers time as they build their products."
Meld's $8 million seed round was led by Coatue and supported by a number of high profile angel investors, including More than 20 angel investors also participated in the round, including DoorDash exec Gokul Rajaram, early Uber leader Emil Michael and Square executive chairman Jackie Reses.