Unit

Unit builds financial infrastructure that lets software companies embed banking products inside their own applications: deposit accounts and wallets, money movement over ACH, wire, check and real-time payments, branded card issuing, and credit products such as lines of credit and invoice factoring. Its customers are platforms that are mostly not financial companies themselves; at the time of its Series B the company said about 80 percent of customers fell in that group. Unit was founded in late 2019 by Itai Damti and Doron Somech, who had previously co-founded and bootstrapped Leverate, a Tel Aviv trading technology provider. The company has dual headquarters in New York City and Tel Aviv, and Damti is CEO.

Unit spent its first year building in stealth and launched its platform in late 2020. Its early backers included Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, Flourish Ventures and TLV Partners. In June 2021 Accel led a $51 million Series B, with those existing investors participating, bringing total funding to nearly $70 million; the company had 26 employees at the time. In May 2022 Insight Partners led a $100 million Series C, with Accel, Better Tomorrow Ventures and Flourish Ventures participating, at a $1.2 billion valuation. That round brought total equity raised to nearly $170 million.

Unit remains independent and private. When it raised the Series C it reported an annualized transaction volume of $2.6 billion and more than 430,000 cards issued to over 330,000 customers. Its own site now reports more than $100 billion in annual transaction volume, more than $3 billion in deposit volume and more than 5 million accounts, and describes direct access to the Federal Reserve, the card networks and bank partners. The company has said it puts compliance at the center of its product and builds its own ledger, which it describes as the most sensitive part of the stack. No later priced round has been located in the sources reviewed.

Unit illustrates the 2021 and 2022 fintech infrastructure cycle. Early backers such as Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph and Flourish invested while the product was still new, Accel and Insight Partners priced it as a unicorn within about two and a half years of founding, and the company has since had to grow into that valuation as the market for embedded finance cooled. Holders have no liquidity event yet, so the outcome depends on whether transaction volume converts into durable revenue.