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Oct 23, 2015 | Brian Merritt & Ryan Hildebrand

In July of last year my co-founder Ryan Hildebrand and I decided to work together to build a new company. We met at the consumer banking startup Simple, which was sold to BBVA last year, and we knew we wanted to continue working in the banking space. While at Simple, we learned a lot about the challenges banking presents for its customers and we knew there were a daunting number of problems that remained unsolved.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed, we were excited to continue using our experience to help move banking forward. We explored many different possibilities, but we kept coming back to our desire to serve the community that is closest to our hearts: small businesses.

For the next six months we talked to hundreds of business owners so that we could understand their problems and find the best way to serve the community. We were continually inspired by amazing entrepreneurs working tirelessly to build great companies.

However, learning more about the banking problems that all of these business owners faced made us ever more frustrated about the limitations of the current system. We felt that they deserved better. So we started Seed with the mission of building the best online business bank in the world.

Our mission is ambitious, but we’re committed to doing our part to help the business community move forward. Today, we’re excited to announce that we have raised $5 million from an incredible group of investors. With this funding we’ve grown our team to a group of 12 extraordinary people, and we’re hard at work preparing to launch to our first members.

Our lead investor General Catalyst has long believed that small businesses are underserved and their investments in industry leaders like Stripe, Gusto, and Fundbox show their commitment to supporting companies that are solving entrenched problems. We are proud to join such a great community.

YCombinator, SV Angel, Pejman Mar Ventures, CrunchFund, Cyan and Scott Banister, Hamid Barkhordar, and Bobby Yazdani all have a track record of backing successful companies at an early stage, and we’re excited to have them as investors.

YCombinator partners Paul Graham, Paul Bucheit, Michael Seibel, and Dalton Caldwell were early believers and investors in us, and together with the rest of the YC partnership, having their support has been instrumental.

We’re also delighted to have some of the most successful founders in the industry as investors, including Tomer London and Josh Reeves from Gusto, Fred Ehrsam from Coinbase, Max Mullen from Instacart, Aaron Levie from Box, Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp, and Joe Lonsdale from Palantir, Addepar, and Formation 8.

We are honored to have the support of our investors as we work to build a better bank. We are inspired to rise to this challenge because we believe that by making it easier to run a business, we can enable more entrepreneurs to build great companies and products that people truly love. Together, we can make the world a better place.

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