Highnote: The Bare-Metal Bet on Embedded Finance

In 2020, while the world was locked down and Zoom was breaking the internet, John Macllwaine and Kin Kee were quietly having a fintech mid-life crisis. They’d just come off scaling Braintree inside PayPal, watching billions flow through pipes that still felt like they were built in the 90s. Legacy issuer-processors were slow, siloed, and treated developers like second-class citizens. Every brand that wanted to launch a card program was forced to stitch together five different vendors, pray the reconciliation worked, and accept that “real-time” was marketing speak for “maybe by tomorrow.”

John and Kin looked at each other and basically said: screw it, let’s build the platform we always wished existed. One API. One ledger. One throat to choke. No more Frankenstein stacks.

That late-night epiphany became Highnote – a bare-metal card issuing and payments platform that lets any company become a card program in weeks instead of years. Four years later, with $139 million in the bank and ARR that’s tripled in two years, the bet is starting to look less crazy and more inevitable.

Where Highnote Fits in the Market

The embedded finance market is no longer a cute buzzword – it’s an $84 billion freight train growing at 32.8% CAGR through 2030. Brands from Shopify to DoorDash to every neobank you’ve ever heard of want to own the payment experience end-to-end. They want to issue cards that feel native, move money instantly, and keep the economics instead of leaking 2-3% to someone else’s rails.

Highnote slots right into that shift. While Marqeta owns the “card issuing for fintechs” headline, Highnote went wider and deeper – unifying issuing, acquiring, ledgers, and wallets under one roof. It’s the difference between handing someone a Lego set versus giving them a finished spaceship. In a world where embedded finance is expected to hit $7 trillion in volume by 2030, the companies that can launch sophisticated card programs faster than the competition are printing money.

How the Platform Actually Works

Highnote’s magic isn’t flashy features – it’s removing entire categories of pain that most people in payments have just accepted as normal.

Imagine you’re a B2B platform that wants to pay contractors instantly, issue spend-controlled corporate cards, and take payments from customers – all with one integration. Highnote hands you:

• A real-time, immutable double-entry ledger that never goes out of balance (goodbye 2 a.m. reconciliation nightmares)
• Virtual and physical card issuance (prepaid, debit, credit, charge) with instant personalization
• Built-in acquiring so you can accept payments without a separate processor
• Modular KYC/KYB, fraud tools (via Feedzai), and fulfillment that you toggle like light switches
• GraphQL APIs that developers actually enjoy using

The proof is in the pudding: customers like Flowcast and Fasten Rewards are live in weeks, not quarters. Netevia is routing billions in volume through the platform. BVNK is using it to fund cards 24/7 with stablecoins. One integration, infinite use cases. It’s the kind of “obvious in hindsight” infrastructure that makes legacy vendors sweat.

Growth and Key Milestones

Highnote has been quietly stacking wins since launch:

• $139M raised total – $54M in 2021 (Oak HC/FT, Costanoa, WestCap) followed by a $90M Series B in January 2025 led by Adams Street at north of $750M valuation
• 50+ live enterprise customers and counting
• ARR tripled in the last two years
• Developer adoption up 60% after the unified acquiring launch
• Forbes Fintech 50 and America’s Best Startup Employers badges in the trophy case

The January 2025 round wasn’t just capital – it was rocket fuel for the acquiring rollout and the next wave of credit products. When your investors include the same folks who backed Marqeta, Stripe, and Plaid, the bar is sky-high… and Highnote keeps clearing it.

The Competitive Landscape

The card-issuing sandbox is getting crowded, but Highnote plays a different game:

• Marqeta: The 800-pound gorilla, incredible at customization, but still makes you glue acquiring somewhere else
• Stripe Issuing: Simple and cheap, but you’re living inside Stripe’s garden walls
• Galileo/Lithic/Adyen: Solid platforms, but none give you the full issuing + acquiring + ledger combo in one stack
• Legacy processors (FIS, Fiserv, TSYS): They have the volume, you have the migraine

Highnote’s edge is the unified data model. One real-time ledger means fraud rules, spend controls, and rewards all see the same truth. That coherence is brutally hard to replicate and becomes stickier the deeper you embed.

Regulatory and Risk Environment

Payments regulation is a never-ending gauntlet – CFPB, FDIC, state money-transmitter licenses, PCI, AML, the whole circus. Highnote went bare-metal on purpose: direct connections to Visa and Mastercard, full control over the processor, and compliance baked into every API call. No lawsuits on the books, no major breaches, and a clean PCI attestation that took record time.

Risks? Sure. Open banking rules could commoditize some data layers. Visa and Mastercard could always integrate vertically (they’ve tried before). A bad actor slipping through fraud controls at scale would hurt. But the Braintree alumni know exactly where the bodies are buried in this industry – and they built the platform to avoid those graves.

What’s Next for Highnote

2025–2027 is when Highnote stops being “the hot new platform” and starts being infrastructure.

Already shipping: U.S. merchant acquiring, instant payments, stablecoin funding rails. Next up: Full credit programs, deeper AI fraud models, and expansion into verticals where real-time ledgers are pure rocket fuel (think fleet cards, expense management, payroll).

If the embedded finance forecasts are even half-right, Highnote is sitting on one of the best wedges in payments. A $750M valuation today starts looking quaint when you’re processing tens of billions and every new customer makes the network smarter.

The Bottom Line

Highnote is what happens when two guys who’ve already scaled a payments unicorn get fed up enough to do it again – only cleaner, faster, and with better APIs.

Three quiet truths it’s proving:

• The future of payments isn’t another neobank app – it’s invisible rails baked into every software product
• Unified data beats fragmented features every single time
• Sometimes the most disruptive move is building the platform you wish existed when you were the customer

In a market obsessed with splashy consumer launches, Highnote is happily selling picks and shovels to the people building the next gold rush.

Author: This article was originally written by Vickram Kaura and published on Fintech Observer. Shared here with the author’s permission.