Plaid

Plaid built an API connecting every financial app to every bank in America. A fintech founder faced a brutal choice: write thousands of lines of code to handle bank integrations or launch faster. Plaid handled it. Add API, customers connected accounts in seconds. Plaid became invisible infrastructure. Venmo, Square, PayPal realized something basic: they needed this. Building it in-house required hiring engineers, maintaining certifications, handling thousands of integrations, surviving regulatory scrutiny. Paying Plaid cost less than hiring ten engineers for six months. Defensibility came from integration depth and time. The API connected to nine thousand financial institutions.