Unit provides banking-as-a-service APIs that let companies in industries like the freelance/creator economy and personal financial management build and launch bank accounts, cards, payment and lending products. The founders spent the first year stealthily building the technology to accelerate partners' time to market for embedded financial services. Unit reports strong recent growth: transaction volume grew 7x over the last six months and it has crossed an annualized transaction volume of $2.6 billion. The company has issued over 430,000 cards to more than 330,000 customers and seen a 10x increase in deposit volumes. Unit was founded in late 2019 and maintains dual headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York City. The founders, Itai Damti and Doron Somech, previously bootstrapped and grew trading-tech provider Leverate. Unit builds a BaaS platform that lets companies and fintechs launch accounts, cards, payments and lending through one API and dashboard. Founded in late 2019 and launched in late 2020, Unit has dual headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York City. The company says it owns the ledger and emphasizes compliance, having hired a chief compliance officer and integrated with partners like Plaid. Over the past three months it reported deposit volume growth of more than 300% and new end users up 600% (from a small base). Customers include Wethos, Lance, Benepass, Moves and Tribevest. Unit plans to grow its headcount (26 at the time of the article), fast-track its Unit Go offering and expand into additional financial products, SDKs and integrations. Unit provides an API platform that lets third parties integrate banking services—payment cards, checking accounts, cash advances and money transfers—into their products. The company built in stealth and acquired a customer base before opening for business. It plans to use the $18.6M in funding to add features, hire more people, and secure new users. Unit targets non-financial companies with transactional relationships, such as gig/freelancer platforms, on-demand transportation firms and online bookkeeping services, that want to embed banking capabilities. The team is led by CEO Itai Damti and co-founder/CTO Doron Somech and emphasizes strong compliance, with executives like Amanda Swoverland positioned to support risk and compliance. Unit has Israeli roots and is currently based in San Francisco, and the article places it in a competitive landscape that includes Rapyd and Stripe Treasury.

Total raised

$170M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

May 2022