Synapse Raises $33M As It Gears Up To Expand

Synapse, the startup that enables bank and FinTechs to create digital financial services, raised $33 million in venture funding.

The Series B funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included existing investors Trinity Ventures and Core Innovation Capital, according to a report in TechCrunch. To date, the startup, which used to go by the name SynapseF, has raised $50 million, with a $17 million Series A funding round going down in September.

The aim is to bring financial services to the masses by operating a platform that lets banks and FinTechs work with developers. Trying to take the complexity out of development, Synapse is aiming to be the middleman that makes it easier for companies to connect with banks to automate back end processes.

“We want to make it super easy for developers to build and scale financial products and we want to do that across the spectrum of financial products,” Synapse CEO Sankaet Pathak said in the report. “We don’t think Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo will be front and center” of new FinTech, he said. “We want to make it really easy for internet companies to distribute financial services.”

Given the fact that half of the $17 million the firm raised in the Series A round hasn’t been tapped, Pathak told the news outlet the Series B was more about finding a partner that can help Synapse expand and grow. As part of the investment, Angela Strange, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z), joins the board of Synapse. In the same report, Strange likened Synapse to Amazon’s cloud services, as Synapse lets anyone build a FinTech company just like Amazon’s cloud services lets anyone launch web services.

Currently, Synapse has close to 3 million users in the U.S. and is setting its sights on Canada and Europe as its next places of expansion. In those countries, it plans to launch with payments and deposit/debit card insurance and eventually add lending and investment products, noted the report.