Plaid
“Can an open-banking data aggregator evolve into the end-to-end financial intelligence and payments infrastructure layer for every fintech and financial application?”
Plaid was founded in 2013 as an open banking data aggregator, enabling consumer bank-account connections to financial apps via API. After a failed $5.3B Visa acquisition in 2021, Plaid raised a $425M Series D and pivoted from pure data connectivity toward a broader financial infrastructure platform — layering in identity verification, fraud decisioning, income verification, payment initiation, and credit risk scoring. By 2025, the company had broadened its narrative further around AI-powered financial intelligence, with its Cash Advance Index product exemplifying the shift from data plumbing to risk decisioning infrastructure.