Deserve, the venture-backed fintech company expanding and powering the real-time credit card economy, announced it has secured $50m in equity investment.
The round of funding was led by Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) with continued investment from existing backers Sallie Mae, Accel, Aspect Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners and Mission Holdings.
With this new funding, Deserve will focus on further developing its CaaS offering, hiring engineers and data scientists to build out the platform’s infrastructure, tools, APIs and machine learning capabilities, as well as expanding the fintech’s B2B sales and marketing division.
“Deserve empowers organizations of all kinds – from major financial institutions to consumer brands to universities – to offer customized branded credit cards with tailored rewards for their customers that in turn incentivize loyalty or other user behaviors,” said Kalpesh Kapadia, CEO and Co-founder of Deserve.
“Our API-centric approach means the platform is highly scalable and can be deployed on an advanced timeframe. It allows us to offer a seamless digital onboarding process for cardholders – a simple process for businesses and consumers alike.”
“Goldman Sachs is supportive of Deserve’s mission to expand access to credit, and to simplify the ability for organizations to offer their own bespoke credit card products,” said Ashwin Gupta, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs. “We believe Deserve’s card platform will bring meaningful savings and new opportunities to institutions across a range of verticals.”
FT Partners served as exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Deserve.
Since its last raise in August of 2018, Deserve has grown its capabilities beyond direct-to-consumer offerings to provide CaaS capabilities for leading financial institutions, fintechs and brands.
Partnering with clients such as Sallie Mae, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Honor Society, Deserve’s proprietary platform enables customers to launch any type of credit card product, underwritten for their specific target audiences. Additionally, Deserve has a mobile financial management application featuring credit education, cashback rewards and incentive program offerings from Mastercard, Amazon and Priority Pass.
