Pinwheel builds payroll-connectivity APIs that surface payroll, income and employment data — including non-traditional income from gig platforms and apps — for neobanks and fintechs such as Block, Varo and Lendly. Its flagship products include direct-deposit switching, income and employment data, and paycheck-linked lending. The platform processes more than 4.6 million operations per month (a 400x increase year-over-year) and the company reported a 177x increase in annual recurring revenue in 2021. Pinwheel is classified as a Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) and operates in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which the company says reflects its commitment to data integrity. The company employs about 70 people, roughly two-thirds of whom are engineers. Pinwheel plans to use new funding to triple headcount, stay engineering-heavy while adding go-to-market, revenue expansion and marketing roles, and eventually expand into areas like tax preparation. Pinwheel provides a payroll-connectivity API that enables clients to perform direct-deposit switching, income verification, and payroll-linked lending. The company has positioned direct-deposit switching as a wedge product and is expanding its API offerings from that gateway. Pinwheel says it will be doing close to half of all direct-deposit switches in the neobank market in a quarter and counts neobank Current and mobile payment service Square Cash as clients. The company reported 11x revenue growth last quarter. Pinwheel has grown its team to about 40 people, is reopening an office in the Flatiron District in New York City, and is remote-friendly with roughly a third of staff outside the NYC metro. Leadership changes include co-founder Curtis Lee moving full-time to chairman and president; notable hires include Lauren Crossett as head of commercial and a forthcoming VP of Engineering. Pinwheel provides an API layer on top of existing payroll providers to surface payroll data for income and employee verification, direct-deposit management, and related fintech use cases. The platform lets consumers split or redirect paychecks and enables businesses — for example mortgage lenders — to pull payroll data in a unified, machine-readable format. The team positions Pinwheel as a payroll-data equivalent of Plaid, aiming to power flows between payroll systems and fintech products. The company highlights that 82% of Americans are paid via direct deposit as a signal of the available data in payroll systems. Pinwheel came out of stealth upon announcing a $7 million seed raise and is based in New York City after moving from San Francisco.

Total raised

$77M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jan 2022