We’re thrilled to share that Glide has raised a $15M Series A, led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Pear VC, Pathlight Capital, and strategic angels including fintech leaders from Stripe, Plaid, and Dropbox.
Launched in 2023, Glide is an embedded fintech platform offering a white-label digital portal that community banks and credit unions can give to their customers. In an industry where many institutions juggle over thirty outdated tech tools, Glide offers a unified experience that streamlines infrastructure and dramatically improves customer onboarding—reducing account opening from twenty minutes to under three.
How We Met Glide
We first met the Glide founders Gautam Ajjarapu, Sameer Kapur and Vishnu Chakroborty when they were just juniors in college, and it was immediately clear that their drive and vision stood out. Shortly after, they joined our accelerator, PearX, as part of the S21 cohort.
Why we invested and how we partnered
Glide didn’t start as the product it is today. They had to go through two pivots to land where they are currently. Initially, they were “Message Monkey” – building tools for companies to manage their incoming customer messages. During PearX they pivoted to Burst, a neobank for Gen Z. With the market downturn in 2022 and consumers’ negative sentiment towards alternative investments, they were faced with another pivot. They came to us thinking they could white-label the technology they had built for Burst to traditional banks and significantly improve their customer acquisition. We were skeptical at first (selling to banks is hard!) but very quickly they managed to “win” the banks. Sameer joined the board of a mid-sized credit union – we were impressed.
Pear was there through every phase of that evolution.
We helped the team sift through ideas to reach true market validation, worked with them through multiple pivots, backed their founder-led sales efforts, and supported them as they landed their first 15 credit union customers—all within a year of pivoting.
Our Talent Team also worked closely with Glide as they scaled, helping with numerous key hires and processes as they grew from a small company in our accelerator to their Series A where they are now.
Why We’re Excited
We are so fortunate to have partnered with Gautam, Sameer, Vishnu and the Glide Team. They are brilliant product minds, effective builders, and charismatic leaders.
What is perhaps even more exciting is that there is a huge opportunity in banking to build tools that take advantage of all the GenAI advances, that can make sense of both structured and unstructured data and that can automate the large number of repetitive tasks. Glide is building the modern agentic banking stack and we are thrilled to continue to work with them.