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We recently published The Great Bank Unbundling, a deep dive on embedded financial infrastructure, the rise and fall of banking-as-a-service, and how fintechs and banks are working together today as regulators crack down on several of the approaches these companies have taken.
This week, Synapse, one of the pioneers of banking-as-a-service, has declared bankruptcy. Jason Mikula, who has put out exceptional coverage of the fintech world more broadly, and whose work was a big contributor to our deep dive, laid out the details of this latest development:
“Synapse seems to have inspired a16z partner Angela Strange's popular phrase that "every company will be a fintech." Now it's bankrupt:
After Andreessen Horowitz led Synapse's Series B fundraising, a16z partner Angela Strange, who took a seat on Synapse's board, penned a memo describing Synapse as the "Amazon Web Services of banking," and concluded the note by writing, "In a way, by using Synapse, every company now has the potential to become a FinTech company."
Now, Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy to facilitate a sale to TabaPay, with Synapse cofounder/CEO Sankaet Pathak blaming another a16z portfolio company, Mercury, for creating "issues" behind the scenes that forced the bankruptcy.
For those that have been following Synapse’s slow-motion collapse, the news of the bankruptcy filing and proposed asset and affiliate acquisition are likely unsurprising.
Synapse marks the fourth BaaS intermediary to exit via a distressed sale, joining Bond to FIS, Apto Payments to Qenta Inc., and Rize to Fifth Third Bank.
Of the remaining standalone middleware players, both Synctera and Treasury Prime have undergone significant layoffs as they pivot to focus on selling software to banks, while Unit has struggled to explain how it’s shifting its strategy to address today’s market realities.
While Synapse's story is idiosyncratic in a number of ways, it's the latest sign of the ongoing consolidation in fintech infrastructure — a trend that seems more likely than not to continue.”
You can read his full analysis of the bankruptcy on his Substack here.
ClickHouse was built to address such concerns, offering a real-time processing warehouse to enable interactive data visualizations and real-time analytics. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Product Security Engineer - Remote USA
SDET- Core Database - Remote USA
Nuvocargo provides a US-Mexico cross-border freight solution that encompasses freight forwarding, customs brokerage, cargo insurance, and managed transportation. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Talent Acquisition Specialist - Mexico City, Mexico
Operations Analyst - Mexico City, Mexico
Retool is a developer tool built to streamline operations via a low-code development platform. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Product Designer - San Francisco, CA
Frontend Engineer - San Francisco, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Cleric | San Francisco, CA - Founding Product Designer
Nominal | Austin, Los Angeles, New York - Product Designer, Product Manager, Frontend Software Engineer
Handle | Remote - Sr. Dev Engineer
Mustafa Suleyman, who was “bought in” to run Microsoft AI, has said we should avoid (1) autonomy, (2) recursive self-improvement, and (3) self-replication if we want to avoid existential risk. AI safetyism lives on.
Meta’s Llama-3 70B open model is now performing in the top 5 spot in Arena results.
While many companies see data limitations and the need for synthetic data as a large potential obstacle for AI, Mark Zuckerberg believes feedback loops could be one way to solve the problem of improving AI models.
Speaking of the hunger for data in AI, an ex-Amazon employee is reportedly suing the company after being terminated for allegedly “not being willing to violate copyright law.”
Goldman Sachs announced it was shutting down its robo-advisory practice, and working to transfer its clients to Betterment, a huge validation for robo-advisor technology as well, such as Wealthfront.
As a bill passes to force ByteDance to divest TikTok in the U.S., or be banned, one report indicated that ByteDance would prefer TikTok gets shutdown vs. be sold to someone else.
Zipline announced the company had made its 1 millionth autonomous drone delivery to a customer after 10 years.
Spotify shared its 2023 royalty transparency report. In it, the company showed how the number of artists earning $10K+, $100K+, and $1M+ have all nearly tripled since 2017.
It was announced that IBM would be acquiring HashiCorp for $6.4 billion as IBM continues to build more functionality in cloud automation.
At Contrary Research, our vision is to become the best starting place to understand private tech companies. We can't do it alone, nor would we want to. We focus on bringing together a variety of different perspectives.
That's why we're opening applications for our Research Fellowship. In the past, we've worked with software engineers, product managers, investors, and more. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech companies, apply here!
