When I first met Ruben and Mark I was struck by their great connection – built over a number of years working together at a bigger company and then starting their first business in 2018, also in the fintech space.  They’d been through ups and downs together and had a vision for where the fintech market was going based on some hard-won market feedback.  They also have a cool ‘ham and egg’ dynamic based on their backgrounds, with Ruben focused on product building and Mark focused on commercialization.  Everyone knows a product founder is critical, but we really love to see a team that includes a sales/market fit minded co-founder.

Mark and Ruben’s view of the fintech landscape, and the opportunity to build Quiltt as a platform to help quickly and easily connect third party data sources fit with what we were seeing in the space and hearing from our networks.  Our founders in fintech and in digital commerce (B2B marketplaces and supply chain) were taking advantage of real-time access to financial data, but struggling with the heavy lift around integrating it into multiple third-party systems.  This problem is only growing with the increasing penetration of digital first financial solutions and the increase in the number of back-end integration options.

We believe Quiltt is well positioned to help any business that participates in the payment or transaction flow solve for third party integration, enabling a faster and better product build and better product performance on an ongoing basis.  Due to the interconnectivity of data-sets and the continuing growth of digital commerce, fintechs can offer a new value prop to consumers and non-banks can easily offer financial products to their customers.  

Quiltt’s platform addresses the service and data integration challenge by acting as a “Segment for fintech Data” in that you can turn services on/off easily and unify data without back-end work.  This extends to APIs for account aggregation, payroll data, transaction enrichment, credit data-sets, banking-as-a-service and a host of other data connections that power financial products but result in complicated work-flows and data orchestration.

For many companies, precious engineering resources which should be spent building the core product are now spent writing deep back-end integrations into financial services and data-sets. The complexity of these integrations results in unexpected shutdowns or repeated service outages. Something as simple as extracting bank data from Plaid into an CSV file ends up becoming a time consuming and costly engineering project. 

Quiltt solves these problems in a few ways. First, they are focused on expanding who has a license to build in consumer fintech – which frees up engineers.  It also has preferred wholesale relationships with various ecosystem partners (like Plaid, Spade and ApexEdge/Billshark), and can serve as a single point of contracting and integration.

While fintech companies are running into integration challenges, in other industries the value of low-code solutions has been proven, with Airtable and Zapier reaching significant scale.  And the need for integration platforms has been proven by older companies like Mulesoft and newer players like FiveTran – who get high marks for helping to automate data-source connectivity in industries such as sales and marketing.  Outside of consumer payments (e.g. Stripe, Shopify) very few developers have been able to take advantage of these low-code/no-code solutions

As Quiltt is successful in offering multiple services on its platform, it will scale its customer base and open up the market for fintech app creators and non-bank customers looking to offer fintech products and services.  We believe this represents a big opportunity to tap into the thousands of B2B customers that can benefit from financial data integrations, and can reach significant scale.

While the market has changed a great deal in the short time since we made our investment, we are believers in the multi-year trend of verticalized fintech, and interconnected data sets, and believe that Quiltt can help solve a critical product building challenge.  We’re excited to see what Mark and Ruben can do together.

For more on Quiltt’s $4M Seed Round, co-led by NVP and Greycroft, read the article in TechCrunch.