Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $11.4 million Series A round co-led by Alpha Edison, and Morpheus Ventures.
Existing backers include Raptor Group, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Third Prime, Red & Blue Ventures, Graham Holdings, Walkabout Ventures and Rucker Park Capital.
Kirk and I started Rize with a goal to make financial services simple and accessible to everyone. We envisioned translating a financial world currently defined by regulated silos like Banking, Brokerage, Lending, and Insurance into customer-centric user experiences that match how real people use money in their daily lives. Rize originally started as a B2C fintech company because consumer pain points about money were our expertise, but we discovered that building intuitive financial user experiences wasn’t merely a UI/UX problem — you couldn’t achieve “simple and intuitive” without first rebuilding much of the underlying financial infrastructure from the ground up. So that’s what we did, initially to solve our own problems. But as we talked to other fintech builders about what we had done, we discovered that our uniquely flexible approach could solve the core infrastructure problems that they were running into as well. And so, we pivoted Rize from a B2C fintech app into a B2B platform that supports other fintech builders around their core banking infrastructure needs.
Throughout that journey, our vision for an intuitive, customer-centric financial world never changed, but how we contribute to making that vision a reality has. Our mission today and moving forward is simple: Let fintech builders build.
That means making fintech infrastructure simple, accessible, and ubiquitous for all financial builders, so you can devote your entire focus on building the right user experience without having to worry about the financial plumbing. Rize is the only truly full-stack banking as a service platform that combines all the banking, processing, and compliance capabilities you need into one API-driven platform, so you can get to market faster, with less effort, and better economics.
For all you fintech builders — we have been in your shoes and know exactly the problems that you face today, as well as the problems just around the corner that you can’t even see yet. We don’t think it is a coincidence that successful platforms in other areas of fintech infrastructure, like Plaid and DriveWealth, also started as B2C companies. To build infrastructure that can support fintech builders correctly, you have to have been down in the trenches experiencing the pain firsthand.
Firsthand experience shows you that APIs enabling builders to plug into the existing financial backbone aren’t sufficient. You also have to solve for product flexibility and a future in which builders want to weave together capabilities from a variety of financial verticals and embed them into frictionless user experiences. You have to orchestrate an ecosystem of partners with best-in-class capabilities who are building together towards a unified vision. You have to align incentives and rip an immense amount of cost out of the stack so everyone from the builders to the banks have sustainable economics. And then there’s compliance — maybe the most important yet underappreciated problem of all — which at scale can make or break a fintech. All of those elements come together seamlessly in the Rize platform.
This Series A raise will allow us to continue to improve our core product to further support the needs of our builder customers, such as our recently launched Developer Toolkit, which allows you to build a full banking application in under 30 minutes. Other projects include further enhancing client experience tools like our Rize Admin platform, UDAAP monitoring, and security systems.
Additionally, this investment will allow us to launch a variety of new products including:
Brokerage accounts
Business accounts
New verticals such as Crypto and Credit
And if you think that’s cool, wait until you see what else we have coming down the pike. Our Synthetic Core architecture allows us to do things that have never been done before in this industry.
We’re also investing in our team and making sure we have the right people to take Rize into this new phase of the company. We’re actively recruiting for several roles and more are coming soon, so make sure to check out our open positions.
We’re so excited for what lies ahead and can’t wait for you to see the new products we’re working on. We believe you all will truly blow us away with what you can achieve when you no longer have to worry about your infrastructure and can focus solely on building life-changing financial user experiences. Thank you for all of the ongoing support thus far and we look forward to reshaping the financial services industry together with our amazing clients.