Banking-as-a-service startup Unit closes on $100M at a $1.2B valuation – TechCrunch

Unit, a banking-as-a-service startup, has closed on a $100 million Series C round of funding led by Insight Partners.

Existing backers Accel, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, and Flourish Ventures also participated in the financing, which values the company at $1.2 billion. The raise follows a $51 million Series B financing that was announced last June, and brings its total equity raised since inception to nearly $170 million.

Founders Itai Damti and Doron Somech started Unit, which has dual headquarters in Tel Aviv and New York City, in late 2019. The pair spent the first year stealthily building out the technology with the mission of giving companies a way to embed financial services into their product, accelerating their time to market.

In other words, Unit touts that companies using its technology in a variety of industries — such as freelance or creator economy and personal financial management, for example — can build financial products directly into their software. This gives them the ability to build and launch next-gen bank accounts, cards, payment and lending products.

Unit has seen its transaction volume grow by 7x over the last six months. The startup has crossed an annualized transaction volume of $2.6 billion, issued over 430,000 cards to over 330,000 customers and saw a 10x increase in deposit volumes.

Damti and Somech are no strangers to growing companies. The duo previously started — and bootstrapped — Leverate, a Tel Aviv-based B2B trading tech provider.

The raise is further evidence that startups that enable other companies to offer financial products are among the most well-funded in the fintech world these days. Last week, TechCrunch reported on Dock, a Brazilian fintech infrastructure provider that raised $110 million at a valuation of over $1.5 billion. The startup operates a full-stack payments and digital banking “platform” across Latin America.

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