Financial technology institutions catering to small and medium enterprises for both domestic and international businesses.
The first pure-play online challenger bank was Security First Network Bank. It launched in 1995 just a year after Amazon.com. Over the next 20 years, digital bank startups would gain little traction, especially in the United States. But that changed in the latter part of the 2010s and now there are more than 250 challenger banks worldwide.
But we still haven’t seen a breakout small business bank (see definition below). The digital small biz lenders are grabbing share: Kabbage (now part of AmEx), Square, Paypal, Amazon, Brex and others. But there is not a place where small businesses flock to get deposit, payment, and financing services within a single interface.
Startups of all sizes rely on Mercury as they create the next great companies.
Introducing Mercury Vault: Protect your cash with a money market fund and up to $5M in FDIC insurance – 12x the industry standard.
There are now more than a dozen startups aggressively competing to become that spot in the United States (see Table below)
The FAB Score Ranking (Fintech Attention Barometer) is a proxy for the size of a private fintech company.
| Rank | Learn More | FAB Score* | Founded | Funding $M | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  |
Mercury | 447 | 2017 | $152 |
| 2 |  |
NOVO | 327 | 2016 | $296 |
| 3 |  |
BlueVine | 260 | 2013 | 768 |
| 4 |  |
Found | 123 | 2019 | $75 |
| 5 |  |
Arc | 101 | 2021 | 181 |
| 6 |  |
Relay | 89 | 2018 | $19 |
| 7 |  |
Lili | 84 | 2018 | $80 |
| 8 |  |
Slash | 61 | 2020 | $19 |
| 9 |  |
NorthOne | 57 | 2016 | $90 |
| 10 |  |
Grasshopper | 51 | 2016 | $162 |
| 11 (t) |  |
Moves | 34 | 2020 | $14.1 |
| 11 (t) |  |
Winden | 34 | 2021 | $5.3 |
| 13 |  |
Baselane | 28 | 2020 | $7.9 |
| 13 |  |
Viably | 21 | 2021 | $21 |
| 15 |  |
Zil | 15 | 2021 | $0 |
| 16 |  |
Arival | 11 | 2018 | $10.8 |
| 17 |  |
Vergo | 10 | 2021 | $4.1 |
| 18 |  |
Guava | 5 | 2018 | $2.4 |