Key Takeaways
The fintech industry in the US is thriving like no other—it’s currently worth $4 trillion. The sector has definitely come a long way from its PayPal days back in the late 90s. As people yearn to have wider access to goods and services, American fintech companies have emerged to satisfy their needs, offering easier ways to buy property, send remittances, and pay bills, among other services. Let’s check out the top fintech companies based in the US that broke boundaries in 2023 by delivering genius solutions to global financial markets.
1. Plaid
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2013
Founders: William Hockey and Zachary Perret
Key Contributions: Currently valued at $13.4 billion, Plaid is an open banking service that allows end-users to share their financial data with fintech apps. It also lets developers connect with financial institutions to offer tailored financial technology solutions to customers. It powers over 8,000 fintech apps, including giants like Venmo and Robinhood. It raised $425 million in its latest Series D round in 2021.
2. PayJoy
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2015
Founders: Doug Ricket, Gib Lopez, Mark Heynen, Tom Ricket
Key Contributions: PayJoy’s value proposition is pure innovation. The fintech company helps underserved people in emerging markets like South Africa and Latin America finance new smartphones with a deposit amount and flexible payment plans, with the phone as collateral. The digital lending platform doesn’t enforce late or interest fees; instead, the service gives people discounted prices if they choose to pay for their phone monthly.
3. Ramp
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2019
Founders: Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, Karim Atiyeh
Key Contributions: Ramp is a comprehensive financial solution for emerging and established businesses, equipping teams with credit cards, expense management, and easy bill payments. The all-in-one system allows companies to take charge of their finances and automates financial processes, which helps save money and time. The company has over 150,000 customers, including Spotify and Glossier. It recently raised a down round of $33 million with a $5.8 billion valuation.
4. Tradeshift
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2010
Founders: Christian Lanng, Mikkel Hippe Brun, Gert Sylvest
Key Contributions: Tradeshift is a business-to-business (B2B) platform that streamlines procurement and invoicing processes between companies and their suppliers. One of its prominent financial services is e-invoicing, which eliminates paper and the stress of securing buyer payments. It recently secured $70 million to grow its network of over one million customers, including French multinational Danone.
5. Debbie
Location: Miami, Florida
Founded In: 2021
Founders: Frida Leibowitz, Rachel Lauren
Key Contributions: Debbie is a female-led fintech company with a revolutionary mission—getting people out of debt through a rewards program. The fintech is set to achieve this through psychology-based strategies, where customers share their financial data and the app helps them understand their logic around money, set goals and track their progress. All while earning rewards.
7. Tala
Location: Santa Monica, California
Founded In: 2012
Founders: Shivani Siroya
Key Contributions: Tala is on a mission to service the underbanked in emerging markets by providing them with accessible financial opportunities like getting loans, opening a bank account and owning a credit card. It currently works in Mexico, Kenya, India and the Philippines, where it recently reached 1 million users in four months. Its loans range from as little as $10 to up to $500 with low interest rates, making it a flexible and attractive lending process for people with no previous credit history.
8. Stripe
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2010
Founders: Patrick and John Collison
Key Contributions: Stripe is a B2B payment solution that enables digital payments for companies worldwide. The solution fits larger companies as it lets them customize their payment options between mobile, online, credit and debit card, plus international transactions.
Although Stripe raised one of the biggest funding rounds in March 2023, it did it at a lower valuation of $50 billion (it was previously valued at $91 billion in 2021) backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and General Catalyst. Their current funding numbers demonstrate that even the strongest startups are facing hardships amid a down market this year.
9. OpenSea
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2017
Founders: Devin Finzer, Alex Atallah
Key Contributions: OpenSea is a prominent non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, where people can sell, buy and mint NFTs through multiple blockchains. Because of its whopping success in 2022—it traded $18.8 billion and made $427 million in revenue—its founders were named the first NFT billionaires.
10. Talos
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2018
Founders: Anton Katz, Ethan Feldman
Key Contributions: Though it’s been a rough year for cryptos, Talos is betting on digital asset success for institutions. The fintech company is disrupting the financial services industry by opening the field for institutional digital assets trading; from hedge funds to neobanks. One of its prominent advantages is easy market access to companies with low costs and reduced risks in such a volatile environment.
Talos’ latest partnership with industry peer Figment allows institutions to participate in staking and invest smarter with algorithms that improve order routing and transaction cost analysis.
11. Current
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2015
Founders: Stuart Sopp
Key Contributions: Current is a neobank and the promise of tomorrow’s banking. The fintech company lets customers open their checking account with a savings pod, or a savings option, alongside a debit card with free withdrawals across 40,000 ATMs in the US. To spice things up, Current also offers crypto trading, budget management and rewards, and even allows teenagers to begin their credit history with their first bank account and debit card.
12. Mercury
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2017
Founders: Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang, Max Tagher
Key Contributions: Mercury is making banking easier for tech companies in the global market. The digital solutions company has served more than 100,000 tech startups and businesses with financial technology services like free transactions, no-fee checking and savings accounts, smart expense tracking and corporate card management. They closed their latest funding round in 2022, raising $163 million from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and Coatue.
13. Greenwood Bank
Location: Atlanta Georgia
Founded In: 2020
Founders: Andrew Young, Michael Render, Ryan Glover
Key Contributions: Greenwood’s motto is “modern banking for the culture,” seeking to break the racial wealth gap. The bank’s target audience is Black and Latinx users and business owners, helping them achieve their financial goals by owning a debit card with checking and savings accounts. The fintech company is out to serve the greater good, enabling its users to spare change to make donations to NAACP, UNCF, or Goodr with their Greenwood Gives Back program.
14. Dave
Location: Los Angeles, California
Founded In: 2016
Founders: Jason Wilk, John Wolanin, Paras Chitakar
Key Contributions: The Dave app is disrupting the status quo of traditional banking services by allowing users to open bank accounts without a credit check, giving those with an unfavorable credit score a second chance at life. Its customers don’t need to give a deposit to start and can request cash advances of up to $500 while still foregoing a credit check.
The app also features smart budgeting and offers rewards, which incentivize users to move away from established banks and use neobanks instead. The fintech company has been reporting that it will soon reach profitability, helping establish it as a banking force for those who live paycheck to paycheck.
15. BillGO
Location: Fort Collins, Colorado
Founded In: 2015
Founders: Dan Holt, Kelly Seidl, Scott Miller
Key Contributions: BillGO offers bill payment solutions for people, businesses, and financial institutions. The app is free of charge and helps manage bills and subscriptions so people don’t lose track of their expenses and easily send or receive payments. BillGo is also one of the online platforms striving to remove paper billing altogether for its 32 million users and counting, and is expanding to supply enterprises’ procurement needs via the blockchain.
The company has also recently spread the word on what a healthy company culture can do for workers on all levels.
16. Divvy Homes
Location: San Francisco, California
Founded In: 2017
Founders: Adena Hefets, Alex Klarfeld, Brian Ma, Nicholas Clark
Key Contributions: Divvy Homes is an ambitious fintech company that wishes to help people own their homes at a time when buying real estate seems impossible. The company buys the property and allows users to rent-to-own with only a 2% down payment. The startup is also one of the fintech companies backed by prominent investors like Tiger Global and Andreessen Horowitz with the alluring promise to help those with low credit scores reach the American dream of owning their own property.
17. Avalanche
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2018
Founders: Emin Gün Sirer, Kevin Sekniqi, Ted Yin
Key Contributions: Avalanche is the blockchain looking to compete directly with Ethereum (ETH). It prioritizes scalability and fast transactions at low rates, hosting over 500 finance apps. Many say the platform’s quick transaction speed (less than a second) is its biggest advantage for building decentralized apps (dApps).
Avalanche’s hosting platform, Ava Labs, recently released a report stating that the company, alongside Avalanche, seeks to tokenize real-world assets—an ambitious feat that would take the blockchain company to a new level above its competitors.
18. CoinFlip
Location: Skokie, Illinois
Founded In: 2015
Founders: Ben Weiss, Daniel Polotsky, Kris Dayrit, Alan Gurevich
Key Contributions: CoinFlip is the biggest Bitcoin ATM in the US, with over 2,300 locations in 47 states. The company wishes to popularize crypto even more by incentivizing buying and selling cryptocurrencies with cash. According to Forbes, it’s Chicago’s “fastest growing company,” and reported it as one of the companies that could represent a better future for cryptos amid a turbulent 2023.
19. Stax Payments
Location: Orlando, Florida
Founded In: 2014
Founders: Jacques Fu, Sal Rehmetullah, Suneera Madhani
Key Contributions: Stax is a payment processing company looking to save users up to 40% on payment processing fees. The company self-proclaims as “Orlando’s fastest-growing company,” and not for nothing. It recently announced the appointment of a new CEO, added PayPal to its payment options to widen the use of online transactions to even more users, and launched a product for enterprise billing.
20. Melio
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2018
Founders: Ilan Atias, Matan Bar, Ziv Paz
Key Contributions: Melio is an all-in-one accounts payable solution for small businesses to handle their online billing processes, be it to receive or transfer money and take instant payments with debit and credit cards. For the hefty task of invoicing, Melio generates them and helps companies get rid of financial stress by setting up payment reminders.
Moreover, the company’s platform was recently improved with its Pay Later feature, which lets small businesses manage bill payments in installments so their suppliers get paid on time and they stay afloat.
21. Greenlight
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Founded In: 2014
Founders: Johnson Cook, Timothy Sheehan
Key Contributions: Greenlight wants kids and teens to start their financial lives early. While many wonder how you’re supposed to start your credit history without any previous financial activities, Greenlight answers this question by giving the young ones an easy head start.
The company supplies kids with banking services like debit cards and an educational app to build future financially savvy adults. And what’s more, it recently launched a feature so parents or companions can have a cash-back credit card—empowering entire families to reach their financial goals.
22. Rocket Money
Location: Silver Spring, Maryland
Founded In: 2015
Founders: Idris, Yahya and Haroon Mokhtarzada
Key Contributions: Rocket Money is a bill management and budgeting app that helps its users stay on top of their finances and get back on track with their credit history. The fintech gives users budgeting and subscription management options for free, with in-depth budget customization, and bill negotiation features for a monthly fee. It already has more than 5 million users who have saved more than $400 million and canceled $155 million in subscriptions. Fortune recently named it one of the top ten best budgeting apps of the year.
23. Nibble Health
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2021
Founders: Steven Greene, Phil Markunas
Key Contributions: It’s no secret that healthcare can get pricey in the US, and Nibble Health is here to help employees easily pay their bills. The B2B platform equips companies to support their workers with a reliable healthcare safety net by enabling them to break down their medical bills into smaller chunks free of charge and interest fees. In 2022, the fintech closed an $8.5 million funding round led by Tiger Global and Wing Venture Capital.
24. Petal
Location: New York, New York
Founded In: 2016
Founders: Andrew Endicott, David Ehrich, Jack Arenas, Jason Gross
Key Contributions: Petal doesn’t believe in credit scores, resorting to machine learning to know more about its customers before providing them with three credit card options. The fintech wants to move away from the credit history system of traditional financial institutions which is often unfair and an insurmountable challenge for Americans. It also allows users to get cash-back, no annual fees and a mobile app for easy expense tracking, making it an attractive choice for those who wish to do banking in a modern way.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported the company closed a $35M funding round, propelled by its impressive performance to achieve profitability in 2024.
25. GoodLeap
Location: Roseville, California
Founded In: 2003
Founders: Hayes Barnard
Key Contributions: Although GoodLeap has been around for a while, it has recently soared as the leading B2B loan provider for sustainable home renovations. If you’re thinking of installing solar panels or water-saving turf, the company will lend vendors and contractors the money for you to see these improvements through with flexible payments. The debt then goes to Goldman Sachs and Citi, who manage and securitize it. The company recently made it into Forbes’ prestigious Fintech 50 list.
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