2021 has been an incredible year for Unit, thanks to our customers, team, partners, and investors.

In the demanding day-to-day of building a company, it’s easy to lose track of the bigger picture sometimes. We wanted to take a moment to reflect on all that we’ve accomplished and share what’s next.

Here’s a quick summary:

• Product: We shipped an average of 15 times a week (~800 times during the year) and focused our product development on five main themes.
• Content: We wrote 25+ detailed guides that helped our ecosystem evolve and move faster.
• Traction: Since signing our first customer, we went on to sign nearly 100 more. Today, Unit banks 300,000 end-users and processes 5.5m+ transactions totaling $400m+ (annualized). We now routinely process millions of API calls per day, and we’re on track to growing all these numbers significantly during 2022.
• Funding: In June, we announced a $51m series B.
• Team: Our stellar team has grown from 10 to nearly 50 people across 5 time zones.‍
• Media: Unit was highlighted and awarded by notable publications.

‍What we shipped

We designed Unit to be the simple and robust platform that empowers the next generation of fintech builders. When we signed our first customer a little over a year ago, we didn’t imagine that we’d finish the year serving nearly 100 customers. Throughout the year we’ve continuously practiced our customer obsession by listening to and learning from them.

We shipped 15 times a week on average and focused on the following themes:

• New tools to help you build faster: We shipped tools to help companies build banking faster including a Node.js SDK, a Python SDK, and white-labeled user interfaces. We listened to engineering teams and added 32 webhook events and 25 simulation endpoints. We also relaunched and improved our industry-leading docs.
• A modern banking experience: We’ve added wires and check deposits to help Unit customers offer more complete banking experiences. We’ve also launched add to mobile wallet, daily balance visualizations and other features that help deliver convenient, engaging banking experiences.
• Flexibility: Owning a native ledger means that we could listen to our customers and quickly launch features that give them more control: programmatic card authorizations, card limits, account limits, real-time changes to end-customer terms and more.
• Integrations: We launched a new integrations page that covers a growing set of partners, including Plaid, Currencycloud, Allpoint, and more. These integrations make it easier and faster to extend the functionality offered by Unit.
• Enterprise-readiness: in line with the needs of our large customers, we’ve added features that make Unit more enterprise-ready, from role-based access control to extensive reporting.
  

Building Unit also means focusing on the invisible complexity behind the scenes and how we scale it to serve our customers best. To that end, we’ve added our third partner bank, improved our connectivity to the payment networks and made big investments in our compliance, banking ops, success and support functions. These improvements are less visible than an API or Dashboard feature, but they help deliver important value to our customers: significantly lower fraud rates, faster response times and experts they can talk to at all times.

The speed at which our product evolved, and its growing complexity, made us ask our customers - and ourselves - what’s the best way to communicate Unit’s present and future with the world. We decided on a combination of features page (present), changelog (recent changes) and roadmap (future). We invite you to visit them, subscribe to updates and share your feedback with us.

Our content is our product

We strongly believe that a new generation of builders requires not only new tools, but also new knowledge. This year, we wrote 25+ detailed guides with two audiences in mind.

One audience is companies that explore the addition of financial features, and seek to better understand the costs and benefits in doing so. For this audience, we wrote our guides to Revenues in Financial Features, Banking Infrastructure and Interchange.

A second audience is customers and prospects that seek to better understand Unit and the process of building on it. For this audience, we wrote more than a dozen guides including our Onboarding Guide, Card & Collateral Guide, Reserve Account Guide, Disclosures Guide, End Customer Terms Guide, Fraud and Disputes Guide, Card Issuance Guide, and ATM Guide and more.

Our traction: banking grows

When Doron and I started Unit, we believed that the best way to expand financial access is to make it easier for builders to build.

In 2021, we saw this reality starting to emerge. We’ve been lucky to serve companies that are quickly gaining traction in their markets. In consumer banking, we saw Mos building for students and Bridge building for the underbanked. The rise of freelancers and creators also catalyzed a trend: companies like Lance, Moves, Wethos, and others have all created unique products for independent workers.

We’ve also seen established companies adopt banking as part of their product. AngelList launched Stacks which simplifies formation for startups and provides the banking capabilities they need to operate. Invoice2go provides banking that complements their invoicing and payments solution for small businesses.

The growth of our customers meant significant growth for Unit:

• The number of transactions increased to an annual run rate of more than 5.5M per year.

• The annualized transaction volume has increased to more than $400,000,000. We are currently on track to growing this number to $1,000,000,000 by mid 2022.

• The total number of end-users Unit banks reached nearly 300,000

• We routinely process millions of API calls per day. In November, we successfully processed 7.2M+ API calls in a single day.
  

Some notable customers who built and launched their product on Unit this year are:

With our first year of customer growth and learning behind us, we solidified a north star metric that helps us align the work we do with the success of every company building on Unit: number of active end-users. Our goal is to help every Unit customer increase the number of active end-users they serve by helping them launch quickly and offer flexible, reliable and engaging experiences.

Raising our series B

Unit’s unique approach – a modern tech stack built on a native ledger, streamlined compliance, and built-in bank relationships – resonated with the market quickly.‍‍

In May, we raised a $51m Series B led by Accel, which had brought our total funding to $70m. The capital helped us speed up product development, grow our team and become a market leader in banking-as-a-service. Existing investors Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, Flourish, and TLV Partners joined the round. We were also fortunate to welcome 20+ notable angel investors, including Packy McCormick, Sriram Krishnan and others.

Growing the team

In January we were building the product as a team of 10. In December we were a team of nearly 50 operating across 2 countries and 5 time zones. This year, we’ve hired leadership in important areas: Louise Ng in marketing, Jeremy Bass in sales, Ehud Fisher in product, and Alex Cramer in platform.

It’s still early days at Unit. We love the work that goes into building our company and the people we work with. We’re currently hiring on all fronts: sales, success, support, engineering, compliance, and more. If you want to be part of building an industry-defining company from the ground up, check out our open positions.

‍Unit in the media

Unit’s progress throughout the year has been noticed by industry experts and top publications. Here are some of the notable times Unit was highlighted or awarded in 2021:

• Packy McCormick wrote about his perspective in his hilariously titled article Absolute Unit.
• Business Insider named Unit one of the 57 most promising fintechs
• CB Insights put Unit on their Fintech 250 List
• The Information named Unit the Most Promising Fintech Startup of 2021
• TechCrunch led the coverage of our Series B fundraising announcement

What’s next?

In the first few months of 2022, we plan to launch with 50+ new customers who are currently going through our onboarding process, including some notable names.

Our roadmap is always a reflection of what our customers need: building better end-user experiences and doing it faster. For us, it means supporting more financial products, building a richer software stack and adding valuable integrations. It also means being excellent at handling the invisible complexity behind the scenes.

As far as financial products go, an important area of focus for us in 2022 will be credit. We currently offer accounts, cards, payments and certain forms of credit, such as factoring or business cash advance. We see a big opportunity in expanding our credit stack and helping our customers offer credit products, from early wage access to credit cards to small business lending. We love thinking through the many details that go into this product evolution. Expect some exciting product announcements in the coming months. If you’re looking to build credit products, we’d love to hear from you.

Scaling a tech company is an art that changes with every passing year. Becoming a scale-up isn’t easy, but we’re up for the challenge and we’re starting 2022 with the right foundation: team, product and traction. We owe our progress to our amazing customers, and expect this year to be an even bigger one for Unit, them, and banking-as-a-service as an ecosystem.

If you’d like to get started with Unit, sign up for sandbox now or contact us to book a demo. We can’t wait to see what you build with us.

PS- we’ll say it again. We’re hiring!