Author published in Forbes, US News, Buzzfeed & Huffington Post Over 130 Times. TED-Ed Lesson Creator. NPR Guest. Google Women Techmakers Ambassador.
"Synapse’s problems have hurt and taken down a whole bunch of other startups and affected consumers all over the country. To recap: San Francisco-based Synapse operated a service that allowed others (mainly fintechs) to embed banking services into their offerings. For instance, a software provider that specialized in payroll for 1099 contractor-heavy businesses used Synapse to provide an instant payment feature; others used it to offer specialized credit/debit cards. Until last year, for example, it was providing those types of services as an intermediary between banking partner Evolve Bank & Trust and business banking startup Mercury until Evolve and Mercury decided to work directly with each other and cut out Synapse as a middleman. Synapse raised a total of just over $50 million in venture capital in its lifetime, including a 2019 $33 million Series B raise led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Angela Strange. The startup wobbled in 2023 with layoffs and filed for Chapter 11 in April of this year, hoping to sell its assets in a $9.7 million firesale to another fintech, TabaPay. But TabaPay walked. It’s not entirely clear why. Synapse threw a lot of blame at Evolve, as well as at Mercury, both of whom raised their hands and told TechCrunch they were not responsible. Once responsive, Synapse CEO and co-founder Sankaet Pathak is no longer responding to our requests for comment. But the result is that Synapse is now close to being forced to liquidate entirely under Chapter 7 and a lot of other fintechs and their customers are paying the price of Synapse’s demise..." https://lnkd.in/eAwWyCwj
