MANTL Updates Legacy Banking Infrastructure With $40M Series B

Banking technology company MANTL raised $40 million in Series B funding to continue developing a digital account tool for banks and credit unions.

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“We are on a mission to expand access to financial services, to help traditional financial institutions modernize and grow,” Nathaniel Harley, co-founder and CEO at MANTL, told Crunchbase News. “We are part of the new wave of technology companies transforming the cost structure. It is 10x more cost effective than building a branch.”

With MANTL’s technology, people can open an account from any device with a few pieces of information that doesn’t involve leaving the app or getting up to find documents. Since being founded in 2016, the New York-based company enabled banks and credit unions to raise billions in deposits each year, he added.

CapitalG led the round with participation from D1 Capital Partners, BoxGroup and existing investors Point72 Ventures, Clocktower Technology Ventures and OldSlip Group. The new funding gives the company a total of $60.7 million to date. That includes an $11 million Series A extension last July.

MANTL was initially going to be a challenger bank, but Harley said the founding team realized a bigger problem: Community banks make up 95 percent of banks in the market, but didn’t have tools to compete with bigger banks and were also not growing online.

“We needed to fix the legacy infrastructure that was limiting modernization,” Harley said. “Nearly 96 percent of community banks rely on third parties and are building on a software language that is 60 years old. The gap between community banks and fintechs has been widening. Big banks now have more than 55 percent market share, up from 16 percent 25 years ago.”

Harley believes opening accounts online is where community banks can compete. Four years ago, less than 20 percent offered online account opening, and it is still less than 50 percent today, he added. However, he and his team realized they had to enhance infrastructure without requiring banks to change the legacy infrastructure, as well as give them real time results.

MANTL’s technology enables banks to eliminate paper-based account opening tools and reduce a historically 20-minute process down to two minutes, Harley said.

Jesse Wedler, partner at CapitalG, said in an interview that MANTL’s objective resonated with him after it took 30 minutes to open a bank account for his 2-year-old son. His firm focuses on finding disruptive companies with generational potential.

“There is a trend in enabling incumbents to compete in the digital era,” Wedler said. “As we started looking around, what stood out was that MANTL made account opening a top priority and was giving something of high value to banks. And as we met the team, their focus on solving the problem, and that customers loved the product, we knew MANTL would disrupt this market over time as everyone became more digital.”

Meanwhile, MANTL experienced significant growth in 2020 in both revenue and team, Harley said. Its Series A was strategic, and now the Series B is the result of the accelerated need for digital transformation in banking.

Harley sees more opportunity in the market and wants to capitalize on the growth, which is why the company brought on CapitalG — to understand the opportunity to disrupt and change and redefine banking infrastructure in the future, he added.

With the new funding, MANTL expanded its executive team, including adding vice presidents of both product and engineering.

“We plan to offer new products, including a business account open product later this year,” Harley said. “Small businesses are an underserved market, and we’ve seen through the PPP program that we had to try to figure out how to transform those relationships. We think this will do that and give them banking solutions that they should have had.”

Feature photo of MANTL co-founders Raj Patel, Nathaniel Harley, and Benjamin Conant and inset photo courtesy of MANTL.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias