Unit, an Israeli fintech that helps companies develop and launch new banking products, announced a $51 million Series B funding round led by Accel according to a press release Thursday.
The company says it will use the funding to scale its team, expand its financial product offering, software development, integrations and fast track its newest offering Unit Go.
The funding round brings Unit’s total funding since founding to about $70 million with previous investors Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, Flourish Ventures and TLV Partners also participating in the Series B. Better Tomorrow led Unit’s seed round worth $3.6 million in 2019 and Aleph led the Series A worth $15 million in late 2020 according to Crunchbase.
Unit Go, also announced today, allows companies to create bank accounts and issue both physical and virtual cards instantly. The software is currently in beta and allows founders and developers to create a free account and build a live environment to test their products with real funds. A full release available to the public is scheduled for fall 2021.
Founded in 2019 by Itai Damti and Doron Somech, Unit officially launched its platform in late 2020 and has seen its deposit volume grow over 300% and new end users grow 600% in the past three months, according to the release. Although user base is still small, the platform has helped customers including Wethos, Lance, Benepass, Moves and Tribevest.
“We are acting as a company that connects banks to the tech ecosystem and banks are critical vendors and partners to us, but we see them as a built-in element within Unit, because we believe that the most excellent experience in this ecosystem can only come from software companies,” Damti told Techcrunch.
Damti also said that Unit is distinct from these competitors because it actually builds a ledger, a critical component to the ecosystem.
Unit is attempting to take on a number of competitors in the quickly growing Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) sector, with companies like Treasury Prime and Stripe also targeting the sector.
In other fintech news, money transfer service provider Wise debuted in public markets in London. 10x Future Technologies, a digital transformation venture that helps banks move from legacy systems to cloud-based technoloy, also announced a $186.6 million Series C led by BlackRock and the CPP Investment Board.