Tilled Takes A New Approach To PayFac-as-a-Service, Banks $11M Series A

Payment facilitation startup Tilled closed on $11 million in Series A funding to enable software companies to monetize payments.

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The round was led by Canvas Ventures’ Rebecca Lynn, who was joined by Abhinav Tiwari and Henry Ward, as well as existing investors, including Abstract Ventures, Peterson Ventures and Clocktower Technology Group. The new funding gives Tilled a total of $13.15 million in funding since the company was founded in 2019, which included a $2.15 million seed round last November, according to Caleb Avery, founder and CEO of Tilled.

SaaS companies can use the Boulder, Colorado-based company’s platform with no startup costs or additional overhead. And, in a matter of weeks — versus up to six months — these companies are able to profit from the millions or billions of dollars in payments they process each year, according to Caleb Avery, founder and CEO of Tilled.

Prior to starting Tilled, Avery was in the payment space with credit card processing. While scaling up that company, he was introduced to bigger companies that expressed frustration with some of the PayFac pioneers, such as Stripe, Square and Braintree, about their pricing models for transitioning to monetizing payments, he told Crunchbase News.

“Once they transitioned, their options weren’t exciting and the limitation was that the technology left a lot to be desired,” Avery added. “The other options were legacy banks and processors, but it would take four to six months for integration, and would cause them to have to hire additional staff to do it.”

Avery saw the gap, and Tilled spent two years building out application programming interfaces to make it easier to monetize payments by providing a technology that is easy to implement and a support network that didn’t involve hiring extra people to monitor fraud and settlements.

“We are bringing a turnkey approach,” he said. “You couldn’t just say you were changing the technology, but you needed all three legs of the stool — core technology, implementation and support.”

Avery intends to use the news funding mainly for hiring. Tilled has 15 employees currently, and is aiming to have between 40 and 50 people by the end of the year. For the company to be able to support companies of all shares and sizes, he is looking for employees in marketing, sales, customer support and operations, as well as product development.

As part of the investment, Lynn and Tiwari will join Tilled’s board of directors. Lynn, who has spent 20 years in the credit industry, was looking at payment facilitation and found processing fees were high, and other vendors were claiming to be PayFac, but weren’t addressing the pain points.

When Tilled popped up on her radar, she said she was impressed that they built out their technology fully so that it could turn payment processing costs into revenue generation.

“I see them being a multibillion-dollar company,” Lynn said in an interview. “Their technology is unique, and Caleb spent a number of years understanding the nuts and bolts, so he is able to approach this in an insightful way where few others have done.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias