Deck, a start-up that claims to be developing the Plaid for the remainder of the web, has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round about nine months after closing its seed financing, it tells A Technology NewsRoom exclusively.The new raise, led by Infinity Ventures, brings Montreal-based Decks amount to raised given that its January 2024 creation to $16.5 million.
Golden Ventures and Better Tomorrow Ventures co-led its seed raise.Deck declares that it is developing the facilities for user-permissioned information access throughout the entire internet.
Its browser-based data representatives open the information from any site through automation.To put it more just, Deck helps users link any account online and aims to turn the information into structured, usable information, with full user permission.President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert (envisioned above, left to right) co-foundedDeck in June 2024.
The start-ups technique is to deal with the web itself as an open platform.
It runs under the property that users have tons of important information locked behind usernames, passwords, and session-based websites without any genuine method to share it securely.Deck wants to change that.Just like Plaid provided developers a simple, protected way to gain access to bank account information with user authorization, Deck does the same for the 95% of platforms that do not provide APIs such as utility websites, e-commerce backends, payroll systems and government services, Leboeuf told A Technology NewsRoom.
Its goal is to make it simpler for designers to access the data users currently have without all the manual workWhen a user connects an account, Decks infrastructure deals with everything behind the scenes.
Its AI representatives log in, navigate, and extract the data just like a human would however much faster, more dependably, and at scale, said Leboeuf.It then creates scripts to keep those connections live and reusable without AI involvement going forward.Companies use Deck to remove the friction of getting their user data from places where APIs do not exist or are incomplete, pricey, or unreliable, Leboeuf stated.
We essentially Plaid-ify any sites.
Whether youre doing accounting, KYC, automating reporting, or validating a company, Deck lets you construct those functions in minutes rather of months.Repeat foundersLeboeuf and Lavoie formerly began Flinks, a startup that was dubbed the Plaid for Canada.
The National Bank of Canada obtained it in 2021 for about US$ 140 million.
(Lambert was one of Flinks initially engineers.)After that sale, the founders began speaking with entrepreneurs throughout industries.Again and once again, we heard the very same thing: Our data is broken, said Leboeuf.One founder had millions in food sales intelligence caught in dozens of clunky supplier portals.
Another invested months attempting (and failing) to gain access to music royalty information to help users claim over a billion in overdue royalties.We even experienced the problem firsthand, Lavoie said.
The pattern was clear: data gain access to was fragmented, fragile, and stopping working and not just in banking.
It was everywhere.So they constructed Deck, which today competes with Arcadia, a company that the creators had attempted utilizing however grew annoyed by.The trio believes that current advancements in expert system (AI) have actually underscored the urgency of open access to non-financial information.
Without it, AI threats being trained on out-of-date, prejudiced, or insufficient information.Initially, the company has actually been focused on working with energy business, having actually linked to over 100,000 energy companies in more than 40 countries throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Clients include EnergyCAP, Quadient, and Greenly.
Deck is also dealing with non-utility consumers such as Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies.
It believes that its innovation can be applied to any industry where data is trapped in online accounts.Think of us as the bridge in between the application layer and foundational tools like web browser automation or AI operators such as Playwright, Browser Use, OpenAI Operator, Leboeuf stated.
Weve taken the messy, fundamental pieces authentication, information normalization, rate restricting, consent management, and antibot defense and turned them into a smooth, productized platform.Rapid growthDeck has actually seen the variety of designers developing on its platform grow drastically in the last number of months, according to its founders.
In February, for example, its connections grew by over 120% compared to the previous month.
The start-ups pricing design is performance-driven, charging clients based upon successful API calls.That implies you just pay when the information works, said Lavoie.Like Plaid and Flinks, Deck relies only on explicit user grant link and gather data.While it may hypothetically be violating some terms and conditions, our innovation follows the open information worldwide pattern that was started and significantly promoted by open banking, and has pressed regulators across the world to make it clear in numerous jurisdictions that consumers and companies can access and transfer their information, said Leboeuf.Deck also declares to have proprietary technologies to avoid being labeled as bots or spiders.
Those innovations include numerous various methods, such as vision computing and human-like mouse movement.While we see a great deal of antibot technologies in sectors like telcos or HR, where there is a lot of fraud from identity theft, lots of other information verticals have restricted to no antibot technologies, stated Lavoie.For now, its not using the data collection to train models, instead focusing on building the best way to collect the data instead of structure items on top of the collected information itself.We operate in a dual approval environment, where we would need end-user approval, and Decks customer approval, to utilize the information, Leboeuf said.The company soon prepares to launch an information vertical developer, which it claims will let any developer get up and running for any data verticals for any industry in no time.Presently, Deck has 30 employees.Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, believes that Deck is changing the user-permissioned information sector, just as open banking reshaped monetary data.With a modular platform and multiple-use recipes, they provide speed, dependability, and flexibility that extend well beyond utilities, he informed A Technology NewsRoom.
Jonker has joined Decks board as part of the financing.Intact Ventures, along with previous backers Better Tomorrow Ventures, Golden, and Luge Capital likewise took part in the Series A financing.