Fintech startup Alloy announced Thursday it closed on a $100 million Series C round led by Justin Overdorff, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. The fresh funding values the NYC-based company at $1.35 billion, and will be used to further fuel its mission of helping banks and other financial institutions combat fraud.
By leveraging data from more than 120 third-party sources, Alloy’s platform allows its users to more quickly and safely onboard its customers, as well as automate certain decisions that mitigate fraud and reduce the burden on back office operations. Over the last five years, it has been used by some of today’s hottest fintech startups, including Petal, Ramp, and Gemini.
Built In last caught up with Alloy about a year ago when it closed on its $40 million Series B. Since then, the newly minted unicorn has tripled its revenue, more than doubled its team and grown its client base to more than 200 businesses.
The company also expanded its platform to include transaction monitoring capabilities, giving financial institutions a more “clear, detailed picture” of their customer behaviors, as co-founder and CRO Laura Spiekerman put it.
“Digital identity is constantly evolving. Because of that, fraud exists far beyond initial customer onboarding. By bringing the many pieces of digital identity into a centralized platform, it helps our customers make better decisions and take a closer look at the full picture of their customers,” she told Built In via email. “We started with onboarding, then added transaction monitoring, and have plans to add in more types of decisioning as we grow.”
Spiekerman attributes Alloy’s more recent success to the pandemic, which has forced the entire financial industry to get a lot more techie. But of course, with digitization comes more opportunities for fraud. This combination of surging demand for convenient financial tools and the increased risk that comes with it, she explained, has created a window of opportunity for Alloy to position itself as a “necessity.”
Eventually, Spiekerman said she and the rest of the Alloy team would like to grow into a multi-product platform that covers the entire customer lifecycle, making risk easier to understand while, at the same time, making fintech products easier to build.
“Identity and its associated risk isn’t something that businesses should be figuring out, it should just be something that they install,” she said. “We want to make building a fintech product as easy as building an e-commerce product.”
To get there, the startup will need to not only further innovate its platform, but also grow its team. Spiekerman says Alloy is a “proud NYC company,” adding that it recently opened a new office between NoHo and Union Square that its employees can use in a hybrid model. The company currently has dozens of open tech positions available now, and will be hiring across all departments in the future.
