Itai Damti, CEO at Unit, a financial services company that helps tech firms build financial features into their products (accounts, cards, payments, lending), notes that 2021 was a great year for Unit, thanks to their clients, team, partners, and investors.
In the “demanding” day-to-day of building a business and company, it’s “easy to lose track of the bigger picture sometimes,” Damti acknowledges.
He writes in a blog post that they “shipped an average of 15 times a week (~800 times during the year) and focused [their] product development on five main themes.”
Since signing their first customer, Unit reportedly went on to sign “nearly 100 more.”
Currently, Unit banks 300,000 end-users and “processes 5.5m+ transactions totaling $400m+ (annualized).” They now regularly handle millions of API calls per day, and they’re “on track to growing all these numbers significantly during 2022,” Damti claims.
He also shared that in June of last year, they announced a $51m series B.
Their professional team has “grown from 10 to nearly 50 people across 5 time zones.”
Damti also shared:
“We designed Unit to be the simple and robust platform that empowers the next generation of fintech builders. When we signed our first customer a little over a year ago, we didn’t imagine that we’d finish the year serving nearly 100 customers. Throughout the year we’ve continuously practiced our customer obsession by listening to and learning from them.”
He added:
“We shipped tools to help companies build banking faster including a Node.js SDK, a Python SDK, and white-labeled user interfaces. We listened to engineering teams and added 32 webhook events and 25 simulation endpoints. We also relaunched and improved our industry-leading docs.”
Damti confirmed that they’ve added payment methods, “including wires, check deposits, and bill pay, to help Unit customers offer more complete banking experiences.” They have also “launched add to mobile wallet, daily balance visualizations and other features that help deliver convenient, engaging banking experiences.”
They launched “a new integrations page that covers a growing set of partners, including Plaid, Abound, Currencycloud, Allpoint, and more.” Damti also noted that these integrations “make it easier and faster to extend the functionality offered by Unit.”
He further noted that building Unit also “means focusing on the invisible complexity behind the scenes and how we scale it to serve our customers best.” To that end, they’ve “added [their] third partner bank, improved [their] connectivity to the payment networks and made big investments in [their] compliance, banking ops, success and support functions.”
As explained in the update, these improvements are “less visible than an API or Dashboard feature, but they help deliver important value to [their] customers: significantly lower fraud rates, faster response times and experts they can talk to at all times.”
Damti also shared:
“In consumer banking, we saw Mos building for students and Bridge building for the underbanked. The rise of freelancers and creators also catalyzed a trend: companies like Lance, Moves, Wethos, and others have all created unique products for independent workers.”
He added that they’ve “seen established companies adopt banking as part of their product.”
AngelList launched Stacks which “simplifies formation for startups and provides the banking capabilities they need to operate.”
He further revealed that their “annualized transaction volume has increased to more than $400,000,000.” They are “currently on track to growing this number to $1,000,000,000 by mid 2022,” Damti claims.
He also noted that the total number of end-users Unit banks “reached nearly 300,000.”
They “routinely process millions of API calls per day.” In November of 2021, they “successfully processed 7.2M+ API calls in a single day,” the firm’s management revealed.
Damti added:
“It’s still early days at Unit. …We’re currently hiring on all fronts: sales, success, support, engineering, compliance, and more.”
He concluded:
“As far as financial products go, an important area of focus for us in 2022 will be credit. We currently offer accounts, cards, payments and certain forms of credit, such as factoring or business cash advance. We see a big opportunity in expanding our credit stack and helping our customers offer credit products, from early wage access to credit cards to small business lending.”