Fintech's Happy Plumbers

Plaid is approaching a billion dollar valuation by building the pipes that connect your apps to your checking account. Will the big banks try to snuff it?

- Alex Konrad

In San Francisco, a city known for its startup office perks, Plaid’s signature amenity requires a safety waiver. Zach Perret and William Hockey, Plaid’s founders, love rock climbing, so on the second floor of their office, employees tackle a vertical treadmill that offers endless handholds and footholds, much to the chagrin of their general counsel.

Climbing isn’t just an office perk—it’s part of company lore. On one of their first outings together, Perret dropped his co-founder 15 feet. They laugh about it now: Six years after the company’s founding in 2012, Plaid is exploding in lockstep with the fintech sector it helps power. Its software acts as a kind of plumbing, connecting apps to each new user’s bank to quickly confirm an account holder, without any penny deposits or paperwork. If online financial planning, stock picking and Bitcoin trading are in gold rush mode, Perret and Hockey have the surefire business: the shovels and pans.

Look under the hood at startups like Acorns, Betterment, Coinbase and Clarity Money, and you’ll find Plaid humming away. Developers love Plaid’s fast tech; founders and their investors like saving money by not having to build their own connections. “We built this for ourselves,” Hockey says, “solving problems that were incredibly hard to do.”