Deck, a startup that claims to set up “The Plaid for the Rest of the Internet”, has collected 12 million US dollars in a series -A financing round -about nine months after the closure of his seed financing, Techcrunch only said.
The new increase, led by Infinity Ventures, brings the total number of Deck in Montreal, which has been raised to $ 16.5 million since January 2024. Golden ventures and better Tomorrow ventures led his seed increase.
Deck claims that the infrastructure for access to user orientations is created throughout the Internet. The browser -based data agents “unlock” the data from each website via automation.
In order to express more easily, deck helps users to connect each account online and aim to convert the information into structured, user data with a full user permit.
President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert (see illustration at the top, left to right) Deck in June 2024.
The startup approach is to treat the web itself as an open platform. It works under the premise that users have “countless valuable data” behind the users' names, keywords and session portals that do not really share it.
Deck hopes to change that.
“Just like Plaid, like Plaid, a simple and safe way to access banking account data with user beneficiaries for the 95% of the platforms that do not offer APIs such as Utility portals, e-commerce backends, salary billing systems and state services,” Lboeuf said to TechCrunch. His goal is to access the developers To facilitate data users who already have without all manual work
When a user connects an account, the infrastructure of deck treats everything behind the scenes. His AI agents register, navigate and extract the data “just like a person – but faster, reliable and on a scale,” said Leboeuf.
Then it creates scripts to keep these connections without AI participation in the future.
“Companies use deck to remove the friction, to receive their user data from places where APIs do not exist – or are incomplete, expensive or unreliable,” said Leboeuf. “We basically have websites” Plaid-Ii “. No matter whether you bookkeeping, Kyc, the automation of reporting or checking a company, with deck you can create these functions in minutes instead of months.”
Repeat founder
Leboeuf and Lavoie previously began to be called Flinks, a startup called “Plaid for Canada”. The National Bank of Canada Canada acquired it in 2021 for around 140 million US dollars. (Lambert was one of the first engineers from Flinks.)
After this sale, the founders began to speak to entrepreneurs in all industries.
“We kept hearing the same thing: our data are broken,” said Leboeuf.
A founder had millions of food sales intelligence in dozens of “chunky” dealer portals. Another months tried (and failed) to access music licenses – to help users request over one billion unpaid license fees.
“We even experienced the first -hand problem,” said Lavoie. “The pattern was clear: the data access was fragmented, fragile and failed – and not just in banking. It was everywhere.”
So they built deck that was now competing with Arcadia, a company that the founders tried to use but were frustrated.
The trio believes that the latest developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have underlined the urgency of open access to non -financial data. Without it, there is a risk of AI to be trained, outdated, biased or incomplete information.
First, the company concentrated on cooperation with supply companies after being connected to over 100,000 supply providers in more than 40 countries in North America, Europe and Asia. Customers include EnergyCap, Quadient and Greenly. Deck also works with non-utility customers such as notes.fm, glowify and evive smoothies. It is of the opinion that its technology can be applied to any industry in which data is “enclosed” in online accounts.
“Fit us as the bridge between the layer of application and the basic tools such as browser automation or AI operators such as dramatists, browser use and Openai operator,” said Leboeuf. “We have made the chaotic, basic pieces – authentication, data standardization, rate -limiting, consent management and antibot protection – into a seamless, productive platform.”
Rapid growth
According to its founders, the number of developers has “drastically” built on its platform in the last few months. In February, for example, the connections rose by over 120%compared to the previous month. The startup price model is performance-oriented and calculates customers based on “successful” API calls.
“That means you only pay if the data works,” said Lavoie.
Like plaid and quicks, deck only relies on the explicit consent of the users to connect and collect data.
“While it is hypothetically violating some conditions, our technology follows the Open Data International Trend, which was initiated and very popular by Open Banking, and has made the supervisory authorities worldwide clear in several jurisdiction that consumers and companies have the right to access and transfer their data,” said Leboeuf.
Deck also claims to have proprietary technologies to avoid that they are called bots or crawlers. These technologies include various methods such as vision computing and human mouse movement.
“While we see many antibot technologies in sectors such as Telcos or HR, where there is a lot of fraud by identity theft, many other data vertical have not limited any antibot technologies,” said Lavoie.
At the moment, data acquisition is not used to train models, but focus on creating the best data instead of creating products on the data collected.
“We work in a double consent environment, in which we need the consent of the end user and the customer's customer consent to use the data,” said Leboeuf.
The company soon plans to launch a vertical data manufacturer that claims that every developer will “get up for data vertical for an industry in the shortest possible time”.
Deck currently has 30 employees.
Jeremy Jonker, co -founder and managing partner of Infinity Ventures, believes that Deck “transforms” the data sector with user orientations, “just like open banking business”.
“With a modular platform and reusable recipes, they offer speed, reliability and adaptability that go far beyond the supply companies,” he told Techcrunch. Jonker entered Deck's board as part of the financing.
Intact activities, together with former supporters Tomorrow Ventures, Golden and Capital, also took part in the financing of Serie A.