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How Plaid Built the API Layer for Modern Finance
In this episode of Startup Stories, Lucas and Luna unpack how Plaid, a company born out of a Y Combinator pivot in 2013, became the invisible plumbing behind fintech. They trace the journey from founders Zach Perret and William Hockey building a budgeting app called Tally to discovering that the real problem was access to bank data. Lucas explains how Plaid solved the screen-scraping trust gap by building secure API integrations with over 12,000 financial institutions, and why 2017’s partnership with Venmo was the breakthrough moment. Luna challenges Lucas on whether Plaid can survive Visa’s…
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