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San Francisco-based banking-as-a-service platform Synctera has secured its second Series A extension and launched a new payments integration. 

“We went live in Canada in under nine months and we’ve now scaled our [annual recurring revenue] 4.5x thanks to some new exciting big customers.” 
– Synctera CEO Peter Hazlehurst 

The $18.6-million round extension was co-led by Lightspeed Ventures and Fin Capital, who led Synctera’s seed and initial Series A round, respectively. The round also saw participation from returning investors NAVentures, the venture arm of the National Bank of Canada, Diagram Ventures, as well as new investors Banco Popular and Mana Ventures.

Synctera was founded in 2020 by former Koho and Portage Ventures CTO Kris Hansen, CEO Peter Hazlehurst, who formerly led Google Wallet and Uber Money, and CPO Dominik Weisserth. Its platform, which received early backing from Canadian investors such as Diagram, allows organizations to develop FinTech and embedded banking applications such as bank accounts, card programs, and lending. 

Despite holding operations in both Silicon Valley and Canada, with a majority Canadian engineering team, Synctera launched solely in the United States in 2021 due to the country’s size and ultra-competitive banking industry, and to avoid the regulatory complexity often faced by Canadian FinTech startups.  

The startup signaled it would bring its platform to Canada in March 2023 after securing the National Bank of Canada as a banking partner, as well as its first Series A extension with a $15-million funding round from the bank’s corporate venture arm, NAventures.

“Canada is on the precipice of open banking, and many Canadians have a lot of pent-up demand for the financial innovation that often comes from FinTechs and non-financial institutions,” Hansen said at the time. 

RELATED: Synctera launches embedded banking platform in Canada

Synctera’s offering went fully live in Canada in December 2023, ensuring FinTech apps and embedded banking products developed with its platform were compliant with Canadian payments and banking regulations. 

“We went live in Canada in under nine months and we’ve now scaled our [annual recurring revenue] 4.5x thanks to some new, exciting, big customers,” Hazlehurst said in the blog post announcing the startup’s recent Series A extension. 

Alongside the funding, Synctera has launched SyncteraPay, which allows its customers to work with any payment provider and have all transaction information integrated into the Synctera Ledger. Synctera senior product manager Raquel Fernández-Montes said in a blog post that the new offering responds to the constant new market offerings in the financial services space. 

“We can’t integrate everything–so we came up with SyncteraPay as a universal adapter to our ledger,” Fernández-Montes said. 

SyncteraPay enables customers to connect a preferred payment provider to the Synctera platform via its API, which Synctera compares to an app store, with each payment provider acting as an app. 

Payment providers wishing to be part of SyncteraPay must pass Synctera’s third-party risk management assessment and will be vetted to ensure the Synctera Ledger can ingest the providers’ reconciliation files.

Feature image courtesy Synctera.