Method, a startup that aims to make it easier for fintech developers to integrate repayment, balance transfers, and bill pay automation into their apps, announced today the completion of a $16 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Truist Ventures, Y Combinator, Abstract Ventures, SV Angel, and others. Mit Shah, co-founder, says the new funds will go toward product development and increasing the company’s headcount from eight to 28 by the end of the year.
Method has raised $18.5 million in venture capital to date.
“Jose and Marco realized that there was an opportunity to provide developers with an embeddable API to add debt repayment to their apps and services,” Shah told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In May 2021, we started Method to provide developers with a turnkey infrastructure.”
Method was founded in 2021 by Jose Bethancourt and Marco del Carmen, who had firsthand experience with the difficulties of integrating debt repayment into their previous company, GradJoy. According to Shah, integrating student loans into the GradJoy app proved to be a patchwork of brittle, insecure screen-scraping APIs, physical check mailing, and compliance hurdles.
Shah points out that there is no standard, technically simple way to access and push money to a person’s financial liabilities — their student loans, credit cards, mortgages, and so on. Because of the lack of standardization, he claims that newer fintechs have resorted to using screen scrapers and login credential-based methods to aggregate and access data. However, there is a disadvantage to these approaches.
Method claims 35 customers and over 75,000 users, with an annual recurring revenue of around $2.25 million. While competing with big names like Plaid, MX, Spinwheel, and Dwolla, Shah sees Method holding its own, especially as the platform rolls out new features like real-time credit card transactions, instant balance transfers, and enhanced live data points for liabilities in the coming months.
