Somewhere in the middle of explaining Schedule C filings and quarterly estimated tax codes, the Sequoia partners stopped taking notes and started leaning forward. Lauren Myrick was pitching a banking app for freelancers, and she was going so deep on tax policy that the room went quiet. They backed her.
That moment captures something essential about how Myrick operates. She doesn't sell the vision - she comes armed with the infrastructure behind it. Before founding Found in 2019, she spent eight years at Square, joining as the company's second-ever product manager and eventually running Square Payroll as General Manager. She watched a payments company go from startup to institution, and she understood what the next-generation financial platform needed to look like.
The personal angle arrived through her sister, who ran a yoga studio. Not the running-it part - the back-office chaos that came with it. Tracking income from six sources. Keeping a receipts envelope. Guessing what the IRS would want in April. Myrick saw a structural problem dressed up as a personal failure, and she recognized the pattern everywhere she looked. The self-employed weren't bad at finances. They were using tools designed for someone else.
Co-founded with Connor Dunn - who ran engineering for Square Payroll - Found launched with a specific thesis: the financial stack for independent workers was so broken that fixing just one piece wouldn't work. You had to build everything at once. Banking. Bookkeeping. Tax estimation. Quarterly payments. Invoicing. All connected, all talking to each other, no spreadsheet required.
The company raised $12.75M in a Sequoia-led Series A in 2021 - the round that got TechCrunch's attention and put Found on the fintech map. But the real signal came in 2022, when Founders Fund led a $60M Series B alongside Sequoia and Lightspeed. By that point, Found wasn't just a banking app - it was becoming the operating system for the self-employed.
In May 2024, Found closed a $50M Series C, again led by Sequoia. Total funding now exceeds $125M across six rounds. The platform serves 770,000+ small business owners, has processed over $1.3 billion in card volume, and landed on the Forbes Fintech 50 three years running. Deloitte ranked it #43 on the 2025 Technology Fast 500. NerdWallet called it the best bank for self-employed business owners.
None of that happened by accident. Before writing a line of product spec, Myrick interviewed dozens of self-employed workers - freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, gig workers - mapping every place the financial system failed them. That research became Found's product roadmap. It's why the platform handles things like automatic quarterly tax payments in-app, multiple business accounts under one login, and real-time tax estimates that update as money moves. Not features a designer thought were cool. Features that come from watching real people panic about the IRS.