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In the year In 2021, Solid, rebranded from Wise, raised a $63 million Series B round of funding to continue its FinTech-as-a-Service offering to companies looking to launch and scale their own FinTech products.
The San Mateo-based company works with fintech and vertical SaaS companies and offers banking, payments, cards and crypto products through easy-to-integrate APIs.
We last profiled the company in 2020, before it changed its name, and after it took both a $5.7 million seed round and a $12 million Series A round.
Arjun Thiagarajan, co-founder and CEO at Solid, told TechCrunch that the company has spent the last 18 months working with early customers on product-market fit.
Traditional fintech infrastructure isn’t built for the modern company, he explains, with companies needing dozens of point solutions and often spending millions in upfront and ongoing maintenance costs, all before an actual product is launched.
Instead, using APIs and a few lines of code, customers can embed fintech products and get them up and running quickly.
“Clients aren’t looking for UI/UX, but actually DI/DX, that self-service developer interface with a powerful dashboard,” he said. “We understand what they want – that need for modern infrastructure. They work with banks, but those often don’t have the fintech experience or building blocks to start with to easily assemble.
It was then that they decided to rebrand as they strengthened their business focus. The new Solid name also resonated more with customers, Thiagarajan added.
In the past year, Sold has grown 10x in revenue, doubled its customers to 100, and become profitable. Year to date, the company has done $2 billion in transactions.
After being in limbo for the past 18 months, Thiagarajan says the company is now on track to reach 100 customers. To do this, he and co-founder Raghav Lal thought it was time for a new round of funding. They started the process in May and closed Series B at the end of July.
“We saw early signs that the product market was favorable, so our thought process was to do Series B when we were ready for higher growth, and now we have money in the bank,” Thiagarajan said. “We’re going after the mid-market, so we’ve had to go back and adjust our product while knowing what businesses need. The key was to build our technology from the ground up to give our customers what they want, so we have a full experience.”
FTV Capital led the new investment and was joined by existing investors Headlines. To date, Solid has raised $80.7 million. Thaigarajan didn’t disclose a specific valuation with the new round, but said it was 5x the price of Solid’s Series A.
The capital infusion will help accelerate Solid’s entry into some new verticals such as travel, logistics, construction, healthcare, education and the gig economy. By looking at where the money is moving, the company has identified 40 to 50 different verticals where there are bottlenecks in how the money is moving, but they want to benefit their customers.
The company is focusing on mid-market and large companies, which is another reason Thiagarajan said the investment is important.
“We are talking to Fortune 1000 companies and they feel more comfortable working with companies with strong balance sheets,” he said. A lot of work has been under the radar, so we are bringing out the brand and showing that we are the ‘AWS of fintech’, a one-stop shop. Our goal is to be by their side as a partner, not just a supplier.
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