Increase

Here is a thing about moving money in the United States: it mostly works. Payroll clears. Cards charge. The Automated Clearing House shuffles trillions of dollars around in files that are, and I cannot stress this enough, CSV files. The system is a marvel of mid-century engineering that has been quietly load-bearing for the entire economy for decades. And then, right at the last mile, it is missing a little something.

That little something is the whole business of Increase. The company, founded in 2020 by Darragh Buckley, sells "enterprise-grade banking APIs" - a single programmatic interface to ACH, wires, real-time payments, FedNow, checks, and cards. The pitch is not "we will reinvent banking." The pitch is closer to: the rails are fine, but the part where the data reaches you is broken, and we fixed that part.

Buckley's résumé is the kind that makes other engineers nod. He was, per his own account, the first employee at Stripe, joining in 2010. He then spent years watching the same frustration recur - that the interesting, useful data coming out of the underlying financial networks kept getting flattened before anyone downstream could use it. "It's hard to build good, reliable product on top of an email failure flow," he has said, which is both a technical complaint and, if you have ever worked in payments operations, a small cry for help.

So Increase does an unglamorous thing very deliberately. It passes the underlying network data through to its customers, more or less untouched - unique trace identifiers, real settlement information, the works. It built its own bank core rather than renting one, specifically to control the constraints. And it treats reliability not as table stakes but as the product itself. "We just try to do all of our little pieces, well, reliably, and transparently," Buckley says. It is a sentence engineered to be unquotable, which is presumably why customers like it.

The economics are the genuinely unusual part. Increase never raised a proper venture round. In a category where competitors have absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money - and where at least one high-profile peer imploded spectacularly - Increase is self-funded and, as of 2025, profitable. Over the prior year the company says its monthly payment volume tripled and deposits grew fourfold. Its customers are a fintech honor roll: Ramp, Check, Pipe, and others quietly running their money movement on top of it.

- Filed from the Fintech Desk. Facts drawn from public sources; figures are company-reported and approximate.