Highnote Emerges from Stealth with $54 Million in Funding

Hello World!

We’re excited to introduce you to Highnote, the world’s most modern card platform, purpose-built to grow customer loyalty, engagement, and revenue through embedded card issuance experiences.

Over the past year, we have been hard at work to build an all-in-one card platform and a fully integrated issuer processor from scratch (as close as it can get to bare metal) to address the embedded card issuance use cases of today and tomorrow. We have designed Highnote to give enterprises unparalleled control, flexibility, and speed in achieving their customer mission through innovative embedded finance experiences.

With our developer-friendly platform, product and engineering teams at digital enterprises of all sizes, can easily and efficiently embed virtual and physical payment cards (commercial and consumer prepaid, debit, credit, and charge), ledger, and wallet capabilities into existing products, thereby creating compelling value for users while growing revenue and building a unique and differentiated brand.

We’re also making it possible for customers to iterate and enhance their offering once their programs have been launched. This is a fundamental belief for us, since we understand that every successful product needs to go through its evolution of product-market-fit iteration before it can scale for mass adoption. Most enterprises looking to launch embedded card products will be doing so for the first time, and as a new product/product capability. Therefore, it was important for us to provide customers the flexibility to iterate and establish product-market-fit to succeed in a rapidly changing and competitive digital market. This philosophy reflects not only in our technical capabilities and platform but also permeates through in our go-to-market and servicing.

One example of this: We built Highnote with GraphQL APIs, which allows for unparalleled customization. The outcome for clients is that they can A / B test, iterate, respond to outcomes, and make better business decisions. Our data models and application domains are architected to support configurations and customizations that unlock use cases that are deemed too difficult to gracefully handle by legacy rigid platforms out there.

Think about it. This has really never been done before. No other payments infrastructure platform in the market today, allows for such flexibility and control while significantly reducing the total cost of ownership. All the while simplifying launch to a point where this truly becomes an embeddable API capability.

In the past decade, there has been an amazing amount of innovation on the “front end” with fintech – better customer experiences (digital cards like Apple Pay, mobile-only banks), frictionless payment experiences (Uber, DoorDash), and more forward-thinking business models that have had the luxury to embrace embedded finance (earned-wage access, seamless and instant B2B invoice settlement).

However, most of these embedded finance capabilities have been limited to massive enterprises (the 1% of enterprises) like Amazon, Shopify, and Apple thanks to their vast resources and armies of engineers. The remaining 99% of enterprises which form the backbone of the world economy, have had very limited choices and have had to rely on legacy providers that offer clunky, decade-old platforms that don’t give them the control and flexibility they need to compete and also require lengthy and expensive implementations.

Our mission at Highnote is to bring these capabilities at scale for the 99% of enterprises that are on the sidelines waiting to unleash embedded finance innovation in their core businesses and unlock $3.6 trillion in market value over the next decade in the US alone.

Today, we’re super energized to come out of stealth with $54M+ in Seed and Series A funding from top tier fintech VCs: Oak HC/FT, Costanoa Ventures, XYZ Ventures, SVB Capital, and WestCap. With a team of 42 individuals that have come together from some of the world’s top payments and fintech innovators (such as Braintree, Paypal, Lending Club, Google, VISA, Venmo, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan) we are here to provide the products, tools, and advice innovative enterprises need to grow revenue and build brand using embedded card experiences.

If you are an enterprise actively exploring embedding card payments into your existing product roadmap to grow revenue, grow engagement, and grow loyalty, come grow with us!

If you are someone who feels passionately about payments, fintech and/or embedded finance, please hit us up about career opportunities.