Deserve To Grow CaaS Platform And Hire Talent With Goldman Sachs Investment

By Amit Chowdhry ● Nov 8, 2019
  • Financial technology company Deserve announced it raised $50 million in equity funding led by Goldman Sachs

Deserve — a venture-backed financial technology company that is expanding and powering the real-time credit card economy — has announced that it raised $50 million in equity funding. This round of funding was led by Goldman Sachs with continued investment from existing backers Sallie Mae, Accel, Aspect Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, and Mission Holdings.

With this round of funding, Deserve will focus on growing 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.”

Ever since Deserve raised its last round in August 2018, the company has grown its capabilities beyond direct-to-consumer offerings to provide CaaS capabilities for leading financial institutions, financial technology companies, and brands. Specifically, Deserved is partnered with clients like Sallie Mae, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Honor Society.

“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,” added Ashwin Gupta, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. “We believe Deserve’s card platform will bring meaningful savings and new opportunities to institutions across a range of verticals.”

Deserve’s proprietary platform enables customers to launch any type of credit card product that is underwritten for their specific target audiences. And Deserve has a mobile financial management application featuring credit education, cashback rewards, and incentive program offerings from Mastercard, Amazon and Priority Pass.

FT Partners had served as exclusive strategic and financial advisor to Deserve for this funding round.