Alternative banking service BankSimple has just announced $10 million in funding led by IA Ventures and joined by existing investors and Shasta Ventures. This Series B round will join the $3.1 million in Series A and seed that the startup saw from investors including First Round Capital, IA , Village Ventures, SV Angel and others.
Along with the financing, the company also announced partnerships with Visa, CBW Bank, Allpoint, The Bancorp Bank, Andera as well as TxVia. BankSimple is still in stealth but plans on opening its doors by the end of the year, its white credit cards will be going into “Friends and Family” test mode shortly, according to its announcement post.
Co-founded by CEO Joshua Reich, CFO Shamir Karkal and CTO (and former Twitter engineer) Alex Payne, BankSimple’s ultimate goal is to make banking less complicated by giving people a simplified way to save money and make and track purchases in real time, through a pared down no-nonsense web interface.
While it wants to control the front end banking experience, the service needs partnerships with banks who actually hold the deposits — why the banking partnerships with CBW Bank and The Bankcorp Bank are important here. The alliance with Visa will aid the startup getting its white cards accepted at Visa’s millions strong network of merchants and its relationship with Andera will aid in the management of online bank accounts.
The partnerships with Allpoint, the US’s largest no-surcharge ATM network, and payments processing service TxVia are pretty self explanatory.
Below is a video of the BankSimple white cards in action.
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
