Banking as a Service Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

The journey of building Razorpay started in 2014, when Harshil Mathur (CEO & Co-Founder) and Shashank Kumar (MD & Co-Founder) witnessed the dismal state of the online payments industry in India then and understood that they have a larger and more important issue to solve. And That was democratizing online payments for Indian businesses, particularly the underserved market, Startups and SMEs. Over the last 9 years, Razorpay has evolved from a single-product company to a multi-product company, from an online payment gateway to India’s only full-stack financial solutions company, offering payments and banking solutions to businesses. Razorpay today is transforming age-old complexities and changing every known paradigm of money movement for disruptive businesses. Over the last couple of years, Razorpay’s growth has evolved to be an index of India’s digital economy. From a kirana shop in Kashmir collecting payments on our POS device to a textile exporter in Kanyakumari accepting dollars through our International Payments product, Razorpay has revolutionised how businesses have traditionally transacted and interacted with money. Razorpay became the first and only Indian fintech to build a full-stack international Payment Gateway ‘Curlec by Razorpay’ and evolved into a comprehensive provider of payment solutions, leveraging the synergy between cutting-edge technological capabilities and a profound understanding of the local payment ecosystem. The introduction of the new Curlec Payment Gateway aims to cater to a wide spectrum of businesses, expanding its reach to over 5,000 establishments. Be it for international expansion or solving for Indian businesses, for Razorpay, the customer has always been at the core of all disruption, from addressing evolving needs to delivering new solutions. This hyperfocus helped bring Razorpay’s several industry-first innovations into the market since 2014. Razorpay became the first to launch a completely digital on-boarding process for startups, first to launch support for UPI, first to launch support for Bharath QR, first to introduce recurring payments for businesses through Razorpay Route, automating payment receipts and later automate payouts and making the entire process seamless and optimized and many more were introduced aling the way. Other firsts include: - First to launch India’s Multi-Network Tokenisation solution, TokenHQ - Razorpay became India’s first payment gateway to support credit cards on UPI - Razorpay also became India’s largest omnichannel payment gateway for businesses post acquiring Ezetap which is India’s leading offline POS company that was founded with the aim to simplify the in-person offline payments experience. Over the years, Razorpay’s valuation has jumped from $1 billion to $7.5 billion and has added a host of marquee investors to its captable. Razorpay is also the second Indian company to be a part of Silicon Valley’s largest tech accelerator, Y Combinator. Marquee investors such as Lone Pine Capital, Alkeon Capital, TCV, GIC, Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Matrix Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator, and MasterCard have invested a total of $741.5 Mn through Series A, B, C, D, E and F funding. The last financing round of Series F led the company’s valuation to $7.5 Billion signaling one of the fastest increases in valuation for an Indian Unicorn. Razorpay has also made acquisitions with like-minded companies over the last 9 years. In total, till date, Razorpay has made eight acquisitions, Billme in 2023 - A Digital invoice and customer Engagement, Ezetap in 2022 - India’s leading offline POS company, PoshVine in 2022 - India’s leading loyalty and reward management platform, IZealiant in 2022 - A mobile-first, API-enabled, and cloud-ready payment solution and made its first international foray in South-East Asia by announcing its acquisition of Curlec in 2022 - A recurring payments platform. TeraFin Labs in 2021 - the AI-based SaaS platform that facilitates digital financing solutions, Opfin (Now RazorpayX Payroll) in 2019 - The payroll management solution and Thirdwatch in 2019, the first acquisition - The AI-powered fraud detection platform. All these efforts are being done in collaboration with banks, regulators, and stakeholders so that India can build a better place for small and big businesses. Today, Razorpay powers online payments for 76 Of 100 startup unicorns and millions of businesses in India. The core premise of what Razorpay was founded in 2014 and what it is today hasn’t changed. It is to make money movement simpler and easier, whether it is for businesses to receive money, send money, or manage money.

Launched out of Y Combinator’s 2009 Summer batch, Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size—from new startups to public companies—use our software to accept payments and manage their businesses online Stripe is a proud partner of YC companies—from Airbnb (S09) to Defog (W23)—to help them grow their businesses and increase the GDP of the internet.

Automate and strengthen manual risk and compliance operations for fintechs and banks. Given a third party contracts and documentation, Kobalt’s reasoning engine ingests internal policies and procedures, legal commitments, past privacy and compliance assessments, and syncs with external legislation to instantly auto-surface and track risks. We're helping community/regional/sponsor banks increase revenue and scale their partnership and vendor volume, and we're helping fintechs conduct their partner diligence in 1/10 the time, all without needing to increase headcount.

Anchor provides APIs, dashboard and tools that help developers easily embed and build banking products. This includes APIs for creating bank accounts, funds transfers, savings products, issuing cards and offering loans. We also provide regulatory coverage and continuous compliance support to our partners.

Nash enables finance teams to manage all their finance flows in one place and craft their money flow experiences globally. Our ledger-based operating system allows your borderless business to connect all your money accounts, accounting systems, payment service providers, treasury operations, spend management in one place. Our mission is to enable borderless commerce in Africa. We achieve this initially by providing your team with all the finance tools needed to build, scale, and grow your borderless business without the need for a costly and complex in-house infrastructure.

Lenco is a multi-currency digital bank for businesses in Africa. With Lenco, retail outlets, hospitality businesses and startups can easily pay vendors, suppliers and perform cross-border payment while having access to growth capital.

Moni finances small businesses in groups across Africa. The collective responsibility of the group serves as a collateral on the loan while the social pressure from the members ensures on-time repayment. There are over 44million SMBs in Africa.  
 We launched 7 months ago and we already have $72k MRR growing at 50% MoM. We achieved 99% repayment on 11,000 units of loans with over $5M disbursed. This is 15 times higher than most financial services in Africa. 
 Femi (CEO) worked previously with the World Bank with a focus on financial services while Dapo (CTO) led the development of the technology for one of the largest digital lending apps We are also backed by Y Combinator(W22), Magic Fund, Ventures Platform, Voltron Capital and more.

PayCaddy enables Latam companies to launch financial products with an API based platform. Rather than building fintech from scratch, or dealing with a legacy bank, companies can use PayCaddy to open digital wallets with KYC checks, automate online payments, and issue personalized debit and prepaid cards for customers or employees.

Under "Buy Now, Pay Later" business model, Wibond is a 100% flexible digital payment method enabling the 200 million underbanked consumers without credit cards to shop online for the first time. We integrate directly into the purchase flow of online merchants, and we offer consumers a credit, when they have already made up their mind that they want to acquire a specific product. We provide financial and digital access to a large community of people offering payment options according to their possibilities and profile. Wibond is an inclusive and simple solution: - Consumers can create their free account to quickly access and pay without banks, in installments, and without a card. - Merchants with e-commerce channels increase their sales and integrate Wibond in a very agile way by offering a new form of payment and expanding their markets. We’re also integrated in the purchase flow of more than 500 merchants, including Samsung, Musimundo (one of the Biggest retailers in LATAM) , and Motorola. And up to 65% of the payment transactions on these sites go through us.

Parker is a digital bank.

Dayra makes it easy for Egyptian businesses offer Loans and virtual bank accounts to their unbanked workers and customers through their App. For example, one of our customers an Egyptian trucking marketplace uses our API to give truck drivers an early advance on their earnings.

NextPay is a digital bank for small businesses and entrepreneurs in The Philippines. They use us to send invoices, collect payments, do payroll, and pay their bills. NextPay is the best alternative to bank accounts for small businesses and entrepreneurs in the Philippines. We help them similarly to how Brex helps companies in the US, but in a way that is more locally nuanced. We manage their finances and remove the steep barriers that Filipino banks and financial institutions typically require; no setup fees, maintaining balances, or ridiculous requirements. View the full context on our Launch Bookface post: https://bookface.ycombinator.com/posts/51999

In Mexico and US trucking demand outpaces capacity, yet 40% of the time trucks roll empty. BeGo uses Machine Learning to reduce empty returns, deadheads, and carbon emissions. BeGo is co-founded by two brothers, Jasiel, with 10+ years of experience in the industry, and Ivan, ex-Tesla engineer with experience in product design and machine learning.

Almost every company that has to integrate with the legacy financial institutions, faces several challenges when it comes to the product cycle. Not only are the APIs and documentations less available, but they are also old school and ridden with errors and loopholes. On top of that, the lack of a single point of contact from the underlying institutions, makes the already long integration cycle of 5 months feel like a temple run between different departments. And since those services break and update over time, you can imagine the nightmare in terms of coordination between the tech teams. We are a full-stack platform where you can come, select your desired modules, play in the sandbox, and launch your product with the APIs and SDKs within a couple of weeks! Not only that, but we also take care of all upcoming fixes, iterations, and updates without breaking any flow. It's that easy, as it should be. Welcome to the future.

We back growing digital businesses using revenue based financing. Many of growing businesses in Asia are highly "bankable" yet 50-70% are unable to obtain capital to grow their business. Having been business owners ourselves, we experienced firsthand the struggles of funding a business - from expensive equity options to loans that required personal guarantees. We went live in Singapore first to validate the product/market fit. We plan to expand across the APAC region.. Our sweet spot is backing repeatable business spend - expenses that leads to increased revenue. Our financing product allows businesses to keep growing with us over time. Over a third of our advances today are from repeat borrowers. We created a brand new asset class in Asia - offering flexible repayment options, such as tieing repayment with sales. Business owners LOVE this. Our automated financial technology platform ingests revenue and alternative data sources that gives us a proprietary edge in understanding the behavior of our borrowers. As we collect continuous data, we are able to offer better financial and technology solutions, while mitigating our downside risk. Funds are seamlessly deployed via our virtual Jenfi Wallet and MasterCard solution, giving borrowers flexibility to make payments while giving Jenfi real-time tracking of their spend. Recent coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/03/jenfi-wants-to-solve-small-business-lending-in-southeast-asia/

Verto is a cross-border payment platform for businesses; our mission is to simplify cross-border payments in emerging markets, particularly Africa. We do this by providing businesses with superb infrastructure that they can use to convert, hold, receive and make payments across 49 currencies. By connecting Businesses, Liquidity providers, FX Brokers, and Payment Institutions, and banks through our marketplace, companies can choose their foreign exchange rates at the time that suits them, therefore, providing a constant liquidity flow cheaply.

Owny provides businesses with a turn-key portal to issue Funds, SAFEs and Notes. Your portal is fully equipped to manage investors, treasury, multi-currency accounts and ability to send and request ACH/Wire payments globally. Optional features include seamless crypto custody and solutions through Coinbase Institutional.

Founded in 2017, Treasury Prime is an embedded banking software platform connecting enterprise companies to a vast marketplace of banks and product partners to launch next-gen payment ecosystems on their platform. Our banking API offers the quickest, most secure way for fintechs and banks to partner, integrate and build modern financial products and increase revenue streams. We power enterprise-class embedded banking solutions for a range of complex services including money transfer, risk mitigation and integration with bank infrastructure. It's these leading-edge capabilities that helped the company to win Best Banking-as-a-Service Platform from Tearsheet in 2021 and 2022. The company was also named to CB Insights’ annual 2021 Fintech 250 list.

Through our mobile wallet, we allow consumers to receive, store, and send money through their phones. Virtually all the value propositions of a bank, in just one app.

At Prelim, we are on a mission to revolutionize the way financial institutions onboard new customers. We believe that the customer onboarding process should be fast, efficient, and user-friendly. As a member of our team, you will have the opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology and make a real impact on the financial industry. Our platform allows banks and financial institutions to digitize their services, streamline account opening processes, and improve customer experience. By joining our team, you will be a part of a fast-paced, innovative, and dynamic work environment where you can learn and grow your skills. Our team is made up of a diverse group of individuals with a wide range of experience and expertise. We value collaboration, creativity, and a passion for problem-solving. As a member of our team, you will have the opportunity to work with experts in the field, and be challenged to think outside the box. In addition, we offer a comprehensive benefits package, flexible working hours, and a great work-life balance. We are constantly evolving and growing, and we are looking for talented individuals who share our vision and are excited to be a part of our journey. If you're passionate about fintech and want to be a part of a team that is making a real impact in the industry, then Prelim is the place for you.

Aella is a diversified credit payments platform with over 2 million users, offering a raft of financial services to underbanked users across Africa with a focus on lending. We are at the forefront of financial inclusion and empowerment of the underbanked. Aella’s Debt-as-a-service model ensures that agents across Africa are able to have quick and easy access to funding through its partnerships with leading agency banks across the continent.

Bankjoy provides a full suite of modern digital banking software, including mobile banking, online banking, online account opening, loan applications, and conversational AI to banks and credit unions.

Sandbox Banking provides a low-code platform to quickly build and run banking integrations. Our software is literally a web application named Glyue, and it's typically used by banks, credit unions, and fintechs to connect banking systems. Glyue integrations are often web service APIs, batch ETL jobs, file/document transfer jobs, or event-driven pub/sub services (e.g. web hooks, Kafka streaming data pipelines).