Wise, which helps companies offer business bank accounts to their own customers, raises $12M Series A led by e.ventures
Context & Ripple Effects
This round lands mid-wave in verticalized fintech funding: just over a week earlier, Lili raised a $15M Series A for freelancer-focused bank accounts, showing investors backing both direct-to-customer niche banks and Wise's partner-distributed model in the same window.
The bet also anticipates the infrastructure layer that followed — by mid-2022, Solid had raised a $63M Series B for APIs that let any company embed banking, payments, and crypto features, validating the embedded-finance thesis Wise was an early consumer-facing instance of.
First-order effects
- e.ventures' $12M lets Wise scale its core motion: signing more companies that want to offer business bank accounts under their own brand rather than building banking themselves.
Second-order effects
- Partner-distributed accounts put Wise in indirect competition with direct-to-customer vertical banks like Lili — both chase the same underserved small-business and freelancer segments through different distribution channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, banking relationships migrate from chartered institutions toward software platforms that front-end them, with startups competing on who owns the customer interface while regulated partners supply the balance sheet.
The trend: Business banking is being unbundled into an embedded-finance layer, where startups like Wise distribute accounts through partner brands instead of winning customers directly.