Fintech Startups: 12 Innovators in the IPO Pipeline

What fintech tech startups are on the road to an IPO? This list includes various startups that have the potential to become public companies in the next five years. 

I define the fintech tech startups on this list as pre-IPO companies building businesses that aim to disrupt the financial technology status quo with innovative products, services, and user experiences. 

Our list focuses on mid-to-late-stage startups with significant venture capital backing and valuations generally north of $1 billion (“unicorns”).

These companies are pursuing large opportunities in the fintech space using different approaches and technologies. Some on our list may fail, but most, we expect, will become viable public companies. 

Fintech Startups Summary

Here’s a summary of our list of fintech startups. We’ll update the list as new companies grow into unicorn status and become likely to pursue an IPO. 

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Fintech Startups List

1. Klarna

Klarna is a Swedish fintech and e-commerce company. The company provides consumers a comparison shopping platform and flexible payment options, commonly called a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) service.

Consumers shop wherever they choose, whether online, on mobile devices, or in shopping malls, then use the Klarna app to check out.

Once a purchase is in the app, users have multiple no-fee flexible short-term payment options and longer-term options with financing rates ranging from 0% to 29.99%. 

Klarna means “clear” or “clarity” in Swedish. 

Just as we’ve seen companies such as Stripe and Block (Square) modernize payments for vendors, Klarna and competitors such as Affirm are modernizing the payment experience to give consumers more financial choices.

According to a Bloomberg report, the Klarna IPO may occur as early as Q3 2024. 

In November 2023, a representative told TechCrunch the company was moving “toward an eventual IPO”, setting up a holding company in the U.K. and calling it a crucial first step. An IPO timeline was not provided. 

In March 2024, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Fortune:

I always look to the Google IPO and I feel that was a perfect IPO. It’s important that we have met the criteria that we have set up for ourselves to IPO. I hope that we will be able to make it happen quite soon.

Read more about Klarna private stock.

2. Stripe

Stripe is a financial technology company that develops payment processing platforms, including APIs (application programming interfaces) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) packages that enable digital payments.

Its APIs allow web and mobile app developers to integrate payments (both receiving and sending) into everyday business operations.

The company was founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison. The same year, it entered the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. 

Stripe has 1 million + customers, ranging from small startups to the largest and most innovative corporations worldwide. Customers and partners include Amazon, Shopify, Pelaton, Lyft, Zoom, Slack, Klarna, Uber, Doordash, and OpenTable.

A perpetual “upcoming IPO”, Stripe management has found liquidity for employees and early investors in private transactions. Therefore, it has not succumbed to IPO pressures and may remain private until other fintechs conduct successful IPOs. 

Read more about Stripe private stock.

3. Plaid

Plaid is a financial technology (fintech) company that enables seamless connections between customers, financial institutions, fintech apps, and developers.

Plaid builds application programming interfaces (APIs) for the financial industry, including banking, lending, and investing services.  

Beyond APIs, Plaid is becoming an analytics company that provides its customers with user insights and data.

The company has become a must-use platform for fintech, empowering developers at startups and legacy financial institutions to deliver a beautiful user experience. 

Plaid is one of several fintech upcoming IPOs riding the wave of financial innovation and improved customer engagement. 

The company was famously under acquisition terms with Visa until the government filed a case to block the deal. Now, an IPO seems like the most likely exit for investors.

But a Plaid IPO date is elusive. 

Read more about Plaid private stock.

4. Cross River Bank

Cross River Bank is a private fintech company that provides API-based financial products to developers of other financial organizations. It offers its customers access to lending products, credit and debit cards, cryptocurrencies, and payments.

It’s a leading banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company that provides the technology for large companies and small startups to build customer-facing applications.

The company is based in Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan. 

Clients include Affirm, Revolut, Marlette, RocketLoans, Plaid, Upgrade, Remitly, and Upstart. 

CEO Gilles Gade said in October 2023 about a potential 2025 IPO listing: 

That’s the plan. We have to, or our investors won’t be very happy with me.

Read more about Cross River Bank private stock.

5. Chime

Chime is a financial smartphone app that has redesigned how millennials manage their money.

Customers conduct financial activities on the app or desktop platforms and receive a debit card for spending. Chime earns money on interchange fees each time customers swipe their debit cards.

With no physical locations, the company can scale at a lower cost than traditional banks. Its simple-to-use mobile interface appeals to a generation with limited banking needs dissatisfied with legacy banking bloat and fees. 

Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by The Bancorp Bank or Stride Bank, N.A., Members FDIC.

The company is another perennial IPO candidate. 

The CEO told Bloomberg in December 2023 that the company is “IPO ready.”

However, Bloomberg reported on March 22nd, 2024, that Chime has “yet to engage banks on the expected initial public offering”, but is targeting a Chime IPO in 2025. 

Read more about Chime private stock.

6. Circle

Circle is a Boston-based global financial technology startup best known as the curator of the USDC cryptocurrency stablecoin. 

Its mission is:

To promote economic growth, reduce poverty, and improve financial stability by transforming the way money moves. Together, we can create a world that is accessible, efficient, and inclusive.

Like most other cryptocurrencies, Circle aims to encourage the adoption of its coin (as opposed to the hundreds of others). It makes money by earning interest on the fiat currencies it converts to the stablecoin and charges small fees. 

The reason lies in the complicated legacy financial networks that facilitate international transactions. Moving money over international borders is traditionally slow and expensive. Circle aims to streamline the process, making the transaction instant and nearly free. 

Another way to think about it — Circle’s stablecoin is not a speculative investment. It’s a utility for transforming digital international financial transactions that could used by companies such as Revolut or other global financial services firms. 

Circle’s APIs enable developers and various financial institutions to build applications that bridge traditional banking and internet-native money transactions. 

Circle has filed confidentially for an IPO, as reported by Reuters on January 11th, 2024, making it one of the more likely fintech IPOs in 2024. 

Read more about Circle private stock.

7. Addepar

Addepar is a Mountain View, California-based wealth management software-as-a-service (SaaS) company founded in 2009 by Joe Lonsdale and Jason Mirra. Lonsdale was a founder of Palantir Technologies in 2004 alongside Peter Thiel. Mirra was an early Palantir employee. 

The company provides a data platform for wealth management, enabling registered investment advisors (RIA) to monitor and manage their clients’ assets across complex investment portfolios. Its goal is to create more transparency in the financial system.

Addepar’s platform allows advisors to aggregate assets in one place, enabling portfolio trading, rebalancing, and analyzing real-time portfolio data. A significant differentiator is the integration capabilities, connecting systems and workflows with hundreds of existing financial platforms. 

The Addepar platform manages more than $4 trillion in assets and is trusted by more than 850 firms, including family offices, financial advisors, and institutional investors.

The company has not indicated its intent to become a public entity.

Read more about Addepar private stock.

8. Arrived Homes

Arrived Homes is a Seattle, Washington-based fintech crowdfunding platform that empowers individual investors to invest in rental homes and vacation rentals. 

It’s the first company to offer the general public shares of single-family rental homes. The platform caters to people who want to invest in real estate but don’t have the money or patience to buy and manage an entire rental property alone.

Crowdfunding enables investors to start small in owning real estate instead of buying properties alone, hiring a manager, or becoming a landlord.

But Arrived Homes differentiates itself by offering non-accredited investors the opportunity to invest in individual single-family homes and vacation rentals.

Arrived Homes allows investors to pick and choose individual property investments as if they were buying real estate on their own. The minimum for each property is just $100.

The company completed a crowdfunding round in 2024, soliciting platform users to become investors. However, an eventual IPO is likely a handful of years away. 

Read more about Arrived private stock.

9. Brex Stock

Brex is a financial technology company that offers banking services to startups and small businesses. The company provides online software for corporate credit cards, business banking, expense management, business travel, and financial modeling. 

The company was founded by Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, two Brazilian entrepreneurs. They met through a Twitter argument that led to a long friendship. 

The duo previously founded a startup called Pagar.me that they sold in 2016. They then attended Stanford together but dropped out within a year to start Brex. 

Brex started as a virtual reality company, but the founders quickly pivoted after joining the Y Combinator incubator batch in Winter 2017. 

The pivot resulted from the company and its Y Combinator peer’s struggles to get business credit cards without personal liability. 

Brex’s mission is to “empower employees anywhere to make better financial decisions.” Management comments about the company’s public future are scant. 

Read more about Brex private stock.

10. Revolut

Revolut is a fintech startup, neobank, and financial “everything app” based in London. Its mission is “to simplify all things money.”

It offers banking services in the U.K. but is not an approved bank covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). FSCS is the U.K.’s equivalent to the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

Revolut partners with banks to provide banking servicing via its technology platform. 

Services provided include savings, checking, lending, credit cards, stock trading, cryptocurrency trading, currency trading, commodities, business payments, and international transfers. It partners with Cross River Bank for banking services. 

Revolut is London-based but offers services in the European Economic Area (EEA, 30 countries), Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 

It plans to launch in more countries worldwide to make global financial transactions seamless and borderless.

Revolut’s IPO timelines intentions are unclear, but the CEO has indicated he would like to IPO the company in the United States. 

Read more about Revolut private stock.

11. Acrisure

Acrisure is an insurance and fintech company based outside of Grand Rapids, MI, in the Caledonia suburb. Since its founding in 2005, the company has acquired hundreds of small-to-mid-sized insurance brokers that operate autonomously.

Its insurance broker companies offer home, auto, life, health, flood, and business insurance products for businesses and individuals.

The company also provides real estate, employee benefits, and cybersecurity services. 

Acrisure’s proprietary AI-driven software platform, Auris, acquired from Pittsburgh-based Tulco in 2020, is used exclusively by acquired insurance brokers, giving small businesses access to operational efficiencies and sophisticated business intelligence.

Its software platform, Suvaun, streamlines employee benefits and healthcare insurance management. 

The company called itself “the biggest company people never heard of” until purchasing the naming rights to Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, California, and Acrisure Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers. 

Acrisure’s future ambitions are unclear. It may be comfortable as a majority-employee-owned entity. But as it has grown into a $20 billion fintech, Wall Street investors may start asking why it is still private.

Read more about Acrisure private stock.

12. Kraken

Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange based in San Francisco, CA. The online platform allows customers to buy, trade, and store crypto, NFTs, and futures for as little as $10. 

Co-founder Jesse Powell was an early crypto adopter who consulted Mt. Gox leadership after its devastating security breach. He used the lessons learned from the Mt. Gox failures to create a more secure and sustainable cryptocurrency trading platform. 

Kraken is one of the top ten ranked global cryptocurrency exchanges. As of May 2024, it offers access to 261 coins and seven fiat currencies.

The platform is popular with active traders, offering future and margin trading. It’s also planning to launch a stock and ETF trading platform in 2024. 

After competitors such as Coinbase had hugely successful IPOs in 2021, Powell said Kraken was planning to IPO in the second half of 2022. However, fintechs, including anything crypto-related, crashed severely in 2022, and Kraken never IPO. 

Now that the 2021 fintech fallout has settled, Kraken may be an emerging IPO candidate as conditions continue to improve. 

Read more about Kraken private stock.

Disclosure: The author is long Arrived Homes via the crowdfunding platform WeFunder.